Suspicious Lawyer Finds Malware On External Hard Drive Supplied By Police Lawyer In Discovery

By Debra Cassens Weiss
ABA Journal
Apr. 15, 2015

An Arkansas lawyer is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request.

Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock says he became suspicious when he received the hard drive by Federal Express in June 2014 from a lawyer for the Fort Smith Police Department, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports. Previous evidence in the police whistleblower case had been provided by email or a cloud-based Internet storage service, or had been shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.

“I thought, ‘I’m not plugging that into my computer,' " Campbell told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Something didn’t add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first."

The technology expert found four Trojans on the hard drive. "These Trojans were designed to steal passwords, install malicious software and give someone else command and control of the infected computer," Campbell says in a brief supporting his motion for sanctions (PDF).

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