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I'm not an Information Security professional, just a worried layperson.

A few years ago, when I was logged into my own account on a shared laptop, the disc space mysteriously kept filling up. I deleted vast amounts of videos and other large items to free up memory, but the 'almost out of disc space' messages kept coming. The other user was not logged in at the time. I asked him if he was syncing large amounts of emails or photos to the laptop, which he denied.

The other user is now being investigated for possession of indecent images/videos. Is it possible that he caused the disc space to fill up with illegal content, without being logged in at the time? E.g. by syncing from his mobile device / torrenting to his laptop account?

mentallurg
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Notmycupoftea
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    Why don't you check what directory sizes? If other users don't use this laptop, then their directories don't matter. Check the size of directories you ave access to and compare them time to time, e.g. daily or weekly. Why don't you do that? – mentallurg Jan 11 '22 at 17:35
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    `Is it possible that he caused the disc space to fill up with illegal content, without being logged in at the time?` Yes, there are many ways to run a program on a computer without being logged in. A program could be set to run at startup, or set to run by way of the scheduler, etc; and the program could easily have been crafted to download content from remote servers and store this content to disk. – mti2935 Jan 11 '22 at 17:48
  • Is it possible? Sure. How exactly? There is no way for us to tell based on what you've provided. What are you asking? – schroeder Jan 11 '22 at 17:58
  • Sorry I can't provide much detail. I checked my own directory at the time, but there was no identifiable reason for the issue. Although he was found in possession of a small number of illegal images, he denies downloading them and blames pop ups. @mti2935 - that's interesting. Would he have had to craft the program himself, or is it easy to get from other sources? He's tech savvy but not many programming skills. He's also used Tor but claims it was just to get around child safety setting on the router in order to access legal porn. Does that sound likely? Seems like overkill to me. – Notmycupoftea Jan 11 '22 at 18:19
  • @Notmycupoftea A program to download content and store locally to disk could be written with only a few lines of code (tools like wget and curl are frequently used for this). So, he could easily found something that would fit the bill on GitHub or stackoverflow, and perhaps used it as-is or with a few modifications to suit his needs. WRT your question about TOR, I think any answer to this would be largely based on conjecture. There are plenty of legitimate uses for TOR, but also many illegitimate uses. But, the same can be said for the internet in general, or even the wheel for that matter. – mti2935 Jan 11 '22 at 18:25
  • @mti2935, that makes perfect sense, thank you! – Notmycupoftea Jan 11 '22 at 18:30

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