The Trojan Horse Affair 1

“We live in a jungle,” he says . . . We create problems as well as we fix them.”

Before software developers Ruth and Michael HaEfrati presented their program to the business, world, they tried it out on a group of innocent civilians. Every new gun needs a testing ground, computer espionage is no differnt. The HaEfratis found their testing ground in a small neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Their first victims were 12-year-old school kids. Michael HaEfrati became interested in one particular class following a family dispute (because the victims are minors, all identifying characteristics have been deleted). He asked one of the children in the class to do some work for him, something the child was forbidden by his parents from agreeing to. Soon after, other children in the class, especially girls, began receiving threatening and pornographic emails supposedly from the first kid, on their home computers. The child denied the ensuing accusations, but classmates found the denials hard to believe.

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