Warning: this image leads to an explicit gallery.
About five hours ago, ABC News broke a story that an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s inspector general has busted 31 of the agency’s employees (including 17 senior officers) for surfing porn during work — while the economy was in meltdown, circa 2008. Headlines are running hot with the angle that the SEC watched porn while the economy crashed. This is a disaster, for sure, but let’s not forget all the other reasons the economy crashed as we swim into a new wave of anti-porn hysteria: it’s not the porn’s fault, it’s the idiots they hired who couldn’t follow common office protocol about not looking at porn while at work. Or, they thought they were “above the law” as it were. Or, something else is going on. Snip:
Eight Hours a Day Spent on Porn Sites
One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a “significant number” of porn sites.
The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites. After management informed him that he would lose his job, the employee resigned. (…read more, abcnews.go.com)
Interesting notes on this story. First, that the biggest porn fan at the SEC was a woman — the hard drive allegedly with hundreds of images is HER hard drive:
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Next, the sites they viewed that we know about include naughty.com, yourporn.com and spankwire.com — the last is being misreported as skankwire.com. They really don’t check their links, do they? Anyway, ABC hints that there are more; of course we’d love to know what they are. The wording is vague and could include non-porn sex sites, so I’m extra curious. And why don’t they just say Safe Search? Duh, duh.
Finally, take a look at the math. Something isn’t right. This is why I love Reason.com: 1800 times in two weeks, for one person, with a 40-hour week (8-hour day) would mean a request every three minutes (via). 1600 times a month, for one person, is 800 times in one workday.
Is this malware?
Update Friday April 23: We have a few more websites to verifiably add to the list of SEC favorites. Many are transgender, specifically Thai girls. Has anyone thought that perhaps their taste in low-end porn could be improved? Do we think that employees with better taste in porn and common-sense porn viewing etiquette might have made for more efficient and effective SEC workers? At any rate, the list includes ladyboyx.com, ladyboyjuice.com, trannytit.com, and anal-sins.com:
A couple months ago, we discussed an SEC worker who got in a bit of trouble with his employer for checking out a little porn while on the job. The unnamed supervisor made at least 1,800 logged attempts to check out some sites that included www.ladyboyx.com, www.ladyboyjuice.com, www.trannytit.com, and www.anal-sins.com, which, he admitted, “were kind of distraction per se.” (…more, dealbreaker.com)
Apparently this is all coming from a Freedom of Information Act document that hit the news back in February. Anyone have a link to the PDF? Dealbreaker’s is broken (not ironically, either).
… and, Violet, thanks for the warning – otherwise I mightn’t have noticed your link to one of my most faves – and again been reminded that I’m not so alone – as a woman who likes it too – so again, thank you … _^^_
Hang on a sec, let’s do a little reality check here. You say you get somewhere around 1 HTTP request (or “click”) to a porn site every 1-3 minutes or so for those two cases, the 16,000 in a month one and 1,800 in two weeks. This is purely on average.
Consider that a web surfer might click something several times in 1-3 minutes (could be around 20-100 requests, especially if the page isn’t loading fast or at all, and they keep clicking stuff, all of these get logged too) then they stop being naughty for an hour or two when their boss or co-worker is around, then they’ll porn surf later and repeat the process. Also consider the fact that a visited page (especially an unfiltered one) might have scripts, frames, or objects (such as a Flash video) that will access other hosts, which could each also count as an additional “request” to a porn site within the same page.
And if it is indeed a malware program that’s doing something like this, why are there 600+ pornographic images on the hard drive? If a malware program downloaded all those, where can I get one of those installed on my computer? And I think it’s obvious if someone has a hard drive filled with porn, as well as porn burned on CDs and DVDs all over the office that someone was caught red-handed!
“1600 times a month, for one person, is 800 times in one workday.”
Assuming 20 work days a month, that’s 80 times in one workday, not 800.
I wonder if they’re logging auto-refreshes as “requests”.
Are you seriously relying on numbers reported by the SEC? umm… ;)
Show us the router and server logs! How many of the requests were to the same IP addresses? Where was IT? A decent proxy server or domain filter should have caught the requests. Hell, NetNanny would have done a better job.
With the math that you presented, you would think no work was getting done at the SEC and someone would notice all of the clicking and fapping.
I’m with you… With the porn allegation running across the office like that, it would seem some type of malware was released behind the SEC’s safeguards. (geez, I hope that they have decent Safeguards.)
“Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.”
Sixteen THOUSAND works out to once every 1.25 minutes give or take.
That’s assuming a 8 hour day, 40 hour week and 22 working days in a month.
That’s no human doing it. What the heck is their IT department doing? Where my wife works they block so much stuff she can hardly check Yahoo Mail.
“An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites…”
This strikes me every time I read about this. When I attempt to visit a site at work and the screen tells me it’s blocked, that’s the last time I attempt to visit that site. Malware doesn’t reason that way, though, because malware cannot reason. This may turn out to be much ado about nothing.