Hijacked by Porn

It was like stumbling into electronic quicksand: every attempt to escape only drew unsuspecting Net surfers, including children, more deeply into Web pages full of explicit sex. That lurid webscam, allegedly cooked up by a Portuguese hacker and an Australian company, was halted last week by a federal court after the Federal Trade Commission uncovered the brazen scheme. It worked like this: first, according to the FTC, the perpetrators replicated hundreds of legitimate websites, ranging from the Japanese Friendship Garden to the Harvard Law Review. By changing a single line of hidden software code, the culprits then ensured that any visitor calling up these pages would automatically be shunted to their porn site. Once there, the visitors often could not leave: "mousetrapped," with their computers' "back" and "close" commands disabled. Users were thus caught in what the FTC called "an unavoidable, seemingly endless loop" of pornography. Motive for the scam: to boost the number of visits to the porn site--and thus charge advertisers more.

--By Mark Thompson/Washington