Early yesterday afternoon the University Students’ Council was informed of child pornography on a USC-affiliated message board.

An individual visited the USC offices around 12:45 p.m. claiming the content was posted on a message board left over from PrideWestern’s former website.

After receiving the tip, Will Bortolin, USC vice-president campus issues, investigated the matter by searching the old message board.

“I saw the title of a few of the posts had long spam-like titles […] I clicked on one, saw a couple pictures of young girls in bathing suits, felt nauseous, and immediately proceeded to delete the site without further investigation,” he recalled.

Within 20 minutes of notification, the domain was deleted.

The USC and PrideWestern have confirmed the material does not appear to be the result of personal attacks.

Bortolin noted the spam seemed to be coming from some sort of Internet bot rather than an individual hacker.

“It looks like a malicious computer program is responsible for the spam,” PrideWestern co-ordinator Johnathan Sawicki agreed. However, he added they were still unsure and would be examining the issue further.

“I will be working with the USC to investigate this matter,” Sawicki said. “It is my hope that the findings will ensure changes so that something like this will not be able to happen again to PrideWestern or any other groups on campus.”

Bortolin said the message board had not been in use since the release of the new PrideWestern website and, as a result, was not being monitored. He warned others to learn from this example.

“It’s important for web managers who aren’t aware of this potential issue to be careful with discussion boards.”