The case of Julie Amero has all the ingredients of a good news story.

There’s the salacious angle of a substitute school teacher allegedly allowing her students to look at pornography in class.

Then you have Amero herself as the wrongly accused, fighting for her reputation against what seemed to be overwhelming odds.

There’s also the handful of Good Samaritans coming to her aid – in this case the group of security experts who served as advisors to her legal team.

And of course there’s (what appears to be) the victim winning vindication, given a new trial by a judge who seemed to be coming around to the technology at play during the case.

Here’s what some other bloggers thought:

“It actually looks to me that the state now has the option not to pursue this any further, which might be in their best interest…I’m not a forensics investigator, but it sounds like the initial investigators made almost every mistake in the book during the process, and that her first lawyer barely new enough about the technology to use email. Everything I’m reading says this case probably shouldn’t have even gone to court. Little things like your anti-virus and patches help a little in preventing this from ever happening too. I’m glad people like Alex Eckelberry are helping to straighten this out.”
- Martin McKeay, Network Security Blog

“I was happy to read tonight that the guilty conviction against Julie Amero, the Connecticut school teacher originally found guilty of several counts of ‘risk of injury to a minor’ was set aside by the judge today and a new trial ordered. This is not official word that she is out of the woods on this, but the fact that the district attorney did not oppose the motion is a good indication that they have no plans to retry this case.”
- Alan Shimel, Still Secure, After All These Years

There’s one news story that everyone in the IT security world is talking about today: Julie Amero, a Connecticut substitute teacher convicted in January of allowing her students to see pornography on a class computer, was granted a new trial. (That’s just an expression. Some people, I’m sure are also talking about IBM acquiring Watchfire).

A number of security experts came to her aid in the past half-year, showing that this was a case of badware instead of a bad teacher.

While no one is jumping for joy just yet, there’s definitely a well-deserved sense of accomplishment on some information security blogs.

And I’d specifically like to point out Sunbelt Software’s blog, which has full coverage of the event.

“As you can image, I’m very pleased at the outcome of Julie Amero’s sentencing today. However there’s still the specter of a new trial, and so the show isn’t over yet. This event was a testament to the power of a community of people coming together in a common cause. One day, perhaps someone will write a story of this experience. It’s certainly been one of the more amazing events in my career.”
- Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software blog

“As expected, the judge presiding over the Julie Amero trial has decided a new trial is the way forward. This would suggest the whole thing is going to be then speedily dismissed. It also possibly means that those who screwed up the first time round don’t have to stand accountable for their actions, but oh well…The important thing to remember here is that someone’s life was pretty much destroyed because of some spyware and adware – infection files that (let’s not forget) were pretty low down on the “danger scale,” yet still managed to stir up the biggest s***storm I’ve seen in some time.”
- paperghost, Vitalsecurity.org

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see vendors making media-coordinated product announcements for their latest anti-virus protection for scientific calculators.

However, that’s exactly the platform affected by new proof-of-concept malware that anti-virus researchers blogged about in the past week.

Now, before I ruin the summer vacation of every calculus teacher in America, let me clarify that the virus has no way of spreading through the air from one calculator to another – it’s harmless, and just proof-of-concept code at that.

Called Virus.TI.Tigraa.a by Kaspersky and TIOS/Tigraa by McAfee, the malware is less than 500 bytes and affects the Texas Instruments TI-89 graphing calculator with Motorola processor. It clears the screen and posts a message reading “t89.GAARA.”

It’s noteworthy not because of its destructiveness, but because it can attack another device with just enough memory to host a virus and no security to protect it.

“Of course, Tigraa.a is classic proof-of-concept code. It’ll only work on individual calculators, and can’t spread. But nevertheless, it’s created another entry in the roll call of potentially infectable devices.”
-Denis Nazarov, Kaspersky Lab’s Viruslist.com Analyst’s Diary.

“This incident would not be worth mentioning, but it prompts me to emphasize on important point. More and more mobile devices (pocket organizers, smartphones, internet tablets, calculators, etc.) receive enough computing power and not enough security features to create breeding ground for malicious code. We urge developers for all mobile devices to make necessary investment into securing the environment into securing the environment they create. Prevention is always better than a cure!”
- Igor Muttik, McAfee Avert Labs Blog

There are some phrases we reporters type so much, we could easily write them up in our sleep.

Add to the list “personal information of college students breached.”

Last month, a laptop was stolen from the home of a professor at Louisiana State University, breaching the personal information of about 750 students there.

The laptop likely contained students’ Social Security numbers, full names and grades, according to this report in the Daily Reveille.

Meanwhile, the names and Social Security numbers of more than 5,600 students at the University of New Mexico were disclosed when they were unintentionally posted to the school’s website, according to this report in the Free New Mexican.

University officials said the odds are minimal that any of the info was misused because they information, which included names and Social Security numbers, were only on the site for a few hours. Phew!

It’s tough to believe that it’s been a week since the tragic deaths of 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech.

In that time, we’ve followed the story’s numerous information security angles, and we’ve found a lot of what we expected to find: Scammers and spammers will use just about any tragic story that’s received mainstream media coverage as a lure for malware or malicious websites.

So why bring it up again? Handler Tom Liston of the SANS Internet Storm Center posted today that spammers are sending messages across Europe claiming an “Asian national” has gone on a copycat shooting spree, and, of course, urging the reader to click on a malicious link for more information.

Liston sums up his (and most individuals’) feelings on the issue, complete with a fitting description of such scam artists.