Downers Grove teacher faces additional charges related to sex abuse case
Christina Formella, 30, now faces a total of 55 counts, including multiple counts of criminal sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual abuse, indecent solicitation of a child and grooming, which were revealed in DuPage County Circuit Court on Tuesday.
Formella initially was charged with one count of criminal sexual assault and two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse after she was arrested by the Downers Grove Police Department in March.
Formella was arraigned Tuesday on the 52 additional counts and entered a plea of not guilty.
Prosecutor Jaclyn McAndrew asked that Formella be detained under the SAFE-T Act now that additional charges have been brought against her, but that request was denied.
McAndrew unsuccessfully argued that Formella posed a risk to not only the student she abused but other students, noting she lives in close proximity to the high school.
According to prosecutors, Formella groomed the boy when he was 14 years old, lured him into a false sense of security, suggested they had a sexual relationship and physically, emotionally, mentally and psychologically abused the child.
McAndrew told the court that Formella had sex with the boy at least 45 times, including at school, during school hours and at her home. The pattern of abuse lasted almost two years, she said.
'(Formella) knew what she was doing was wrong,' McAndrew said.
Formella also convinced the boy to turn off his location on his cellphone and made the boy feel guilty or shamed, McAndrew said.
'(Formella) is unbelievably conniving and unbelievably controlling,' McAndrew said.
McAndrew said when Formella was initially granted pre-trial release in March, it was believed that it was an isolated incident. However, investigators have since discovered 'hundreds if not thousands of text messages' that corroborate the boy's side of the story, she said.
McAndrew argued before the court that no conditions could mitigate the threat that Formella poses for the community or the victim.
Formella was released after her first pre-trial detention hearing in March and ordered not to have any contact with the victim or children.
Her attorney, Richard Kayne, argued that Formella has complied with the conditions placed upon her in March and there are no threats to anyone in the community. He said that Formella was indicted on the additional charges May 20, but they weren't unsealed until Tuesday. If Formella were a threat, then prosecutors should have made their case sooner, he said.
On Tuesday, Judge Mia McPherson called the case 'horrifying in nature,' 'shocking' and 'appalling,' but she agreed that the community at large is not threatened by Formella. She said she is concerned about the boy that Formella is accused of abusing and believed there could be additional conditions placed on Formella to ensure she has no other contact with the child.
As part of the judge's orders, Formella is required to have electronic monitoring software placed on her cellphones, tablets and computers and her emails and electronic communications monitored to ensure she has no contact with the boy.
Formella was also ordered to wear a GPS monitor to ensure she did not go to the victim's home, school or work, McPherson said.
Formella cannot leave Illinois without court permission and must surrender her passport. She is not allowed entry to Downers Grove South High School and may not have any contact with minors.
Formella faces 60 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.
The boy and his mother went to the Downers Grove Police Department in March to report the inappropriate sexual conduct after the boy's mom discovered text messages on his cellphone.
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Axios
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WIRED
5 days ago
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Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds
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So they decided to try to figure out how that backdoor worked. In the process, they'd find something far bigger: another form of backdoor intended to let authorized locksmiths open not just Liberty Safe devices, but the high-security Securam Prologic locks used in many of Liberty's safes and those of at least seven other brands. More alarmingly, they discovered a way for a hacker to exploit that backdoor—intended to be accessible only with the manufacturer's help—to open a safe on their own in seconds. In the midst of their research, they also found another security vulnerability in many newer versions of Securam's locks that would allow a digital safecracker to insert a tool into a hidden port in the lock and instantly obtain a safe's unlock code. Security researchers James Rowley and Mark Omo. Photograph: Ronda Churchill At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today, Omo and Rowley made their findings public for the first time, demonstrating on stage their two distinct methods for opening electronic safes sold with Securam ProLogic locks, which are used to protect everything from personal firearms to cash in retail stores to narcotics in pharmacies. While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it's the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that's the more widespread and dangerous. 'This attack is something where, if you had a safe with this kind of lock, I could literally pull up the code right now with no specialized hardware, nothing,' Omo says. 'All of a sudden, based on our testing, it seems like people can get into almost any Securam Prologic lock in the world.' Omo and Rowley demonstrate both their safecracking methods in the two videos below, which show them performing the techniques on their own custom-made safe with a standard, unaltered Securam ProLogic lock: Omo and Rowley say they informed Securam about both their safe-opening techniques in spring of last year, but have until now kept their existence secret because of legal threats from the company. 'We will refer this matter to our counsel for trade libel if you choose the route of public announcement or disclosure,' a Securam representative wrote to the two researchers ahead of last year's Defcon, where they first planned to present their research. Only after obtaining pro bono legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Coders' Rights Project did the pair decide to follow through with their plan to speak about Securam's vulnerabilities at Defcon. 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Zhou's statement goes on to point to other ways safes' locks can be opened from drilling and cutting to the use of a locksmith device called a Little Black Box that exploits vulnerabilities in some brands of electronic safe locks. Omo and Rowley respond that the vulnerabilities they found were not previously known to the public; one of the two does not require any special equipment, despite Zhou's claim; and none of the other techniques Zhou mentions represents as serious a security flaw as their findings about the Securam ProLogic locks. The bruteforce safecracking methods Zhou points to, like cutting and drilling are far slower and less stealthy—or, like the Little Black Box, are available only to locksmiths and haven't been publicly shown to be exploitable by unauthorized hackers. Zhou added in his statement that Securam will be fixing the vulnerabilities Omo and Rowley found in future models of the ProLogic lock. 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A Senator's Warning Beyond Liberty Safe, Securam ProLogic locks are used by a wide variety of safe manufacturers including Fort Knox, High Noble, FireKing, Tracker, ProSteel, Rhino Metals, Sun Welding, Corporate Safe Specialists, and pharmacy safe companies Cennox and NarcSafe, according to Omo and Rowley's research. The locks can also be found on safes used by CVS for storing narcotics and by multiple US restaurant chains for storing cash. Rowley and Omo aren't the first to raise concerns about the security of Securam locks. In March of last year, US senator Ron Wyden wrote an open letter to Michael Casey, then-director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, urging Casey to make clear to American businesses that safe locks made by Securam, which is owned by a Chinese parent company, have a manufacturer reset capability. 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ResetHeist Rowley and Omo's research began with that same concern, that a largely undisclosed unlocking method in safes might represent a broader security risk. They initially went searching for the mechanism behind the Liberty Safe backdoor that had caused a backlash against the company in 2023, and found a relatively straightforward answer: Liberty Safe keeps a reset code for every safe and, in some cases, makes it available to US law enforcement. Liberty Safe has since written on its website that it now requires a subpoena, a court order, or other compulsory legal process to hand over that master code, and will also delete its copy of the code at a safe owner's request. Rowley and Omo planned to reveal the existence of Securam's vulnerabilities more than a year ago, but held off until now due to the company's legal threats. Photograph: Ronda Churchill Rowley and Omo didn't find any security flaw that would allow them to abuse that particular law enforcement-friendly backdoor. When they started examining the Securam ProLogic lock, however, their research on the higher-end version of the two kinds of Securam lock used on Liberty Safe products revealed something more intriguing. The locks have a reset method documented in their manual, intended in theory for use by locksmiths helping safe owners who have forgotten their unlock code. Enter a 'recovery code' into the lock—set to '999999' by default—and it uses that value, another number stored in the lock called an encryption code, and a third, random variable to compute a code that's displayed on the screen. An authorized locksmith can then read that code to a Securam representative over the phone, who then uses that value and a secret algorithm to compute a reset code the locksmith can enter into the keypad to set a new unlock combination. Omo and Rowley found that by analyzing the Securam ProLogic's firmware, however, they could find everything they needed to compute that reset code themselves. 'There's no hardware security to speak of,' says Rowley. 'So we could reverse engineer the whole secret algorithm just by reading the firmware that's in the lock.' The resulting safecracking method requires little more than punching a few numbers into a Python script they wrote. They call the technique ResetHeist. The researchers note that safe owners can prevent this ResetHeist technique by changing their lock's recovery code or its encryption code. But Securam doesn't recommend that safeguard in any user documentation the researchers could find online, only in a manual for some manufacturers and locksmiths. In another Securam webinar Omo and Rowley found, Securam notes that you can change the codes, but that it's not necessary, and that the codes are 'usually never' changed. In every lock the researchers tested, including about a handful they bought used from eBay, the codes hadn't been changed. 'We have not bought a lock on which the recovery method didn't work,' Omo says. CodeSnatch The second technique the researchers developed, which they call CodeSnatch, is more straightforward. By removing the battery from a Securam ProLogic lock and inserting a small handheld tool they made with a Raspberry Pi minicomputer into an exposed debug port inside, they can extract a 'super code' combination from the lock that's displayed on their tool's screen and can be used to immediately open the lock. The researchers found that CodeSnatch trick by reverse engineering the Renesas chip that serves as the lock's main processor. That task was made far easier by the work of a group called fail0verflow, which had published their analysis of the same Renesas chip as part of their efforts to crack the PlayStation 4, which also uses that processor. Omo and Rowley built their tool to reprogram the chip's firmware to dump all of its information via the debug port—including the encrypted 'super code' and the key, also stored on the chip, that decrypts it. 'It's really not that challenging,' says Rowley. 'Our little tool does that, and then it tells you what the super code is.' Gaining access to the lock's code via its debug port does require inputting a password. But Omo and Rowley say that password was absurdly simple, and they successfully guessed it. They found that in one newer Securam ProLogic lock manufactured in March of this year, Securam had changed the password, but they were able to learn it again by using a 'voltage glitching' technique: By soldering a switch to the voltage regulator on the chip, they could mess with its electrical voltage at the exact moment it performed the password check to bypass that check and then dump the chip's contents—including the new password. Photograph: Ronda Churchill In addition to Securam, WIRED reached out to 10 safe manufacturers that appear to use Securam ProLogic locks on their safes, as well as CVS. Most didn't respond, but a spokesperson for High Noble Safe Company wrote in a statement that WIRED's inquiry was the first it was learning of Securam's vulnerabilities, and that it's now reviewing the security of the locks used by its product line and preparing guidance for customers including 'additional physical security measures or potential replacement options.' A Liberty Safe representative similarly noted the company wasn't previously aware of Securam's vulnerabilities. 'We are currently investigating this issue with SecuRam and will do whatever it takes to protect our customers,' a statement from the spokesperson reads, 'including validating other potential lock suppliers and developing a new proprietary lock system.' A CVS spokesperson declined to comment on 'specific security protocols or devices,' but wrote that 'the safety of our employees and patients is a top priority and we are committed to maintaining the highest physical security standards.' 'Safes That Aren't Safe' Rowley and Omo say that patching Securam Locks' security flaws is possible—their own CodeSnatch tool, in fact, could itself be used to update the locks' firmware. But any such fix would have to be implemented manually, lock by lock, a slow and expensive process. Although Omo and Rowley aren't releasing the full technical details or any proof-of-concept code for their techniques, they warn that others with less benevolent intentions could still figure out how to replicate their safecracking tricks. 'If you have the hardware and you're skilled in the art, this would be roughly a one-week thing,' Omo says. He and Rowley decided to go public with their research despite that risk to make safe owners aware that their locked metal boxes may not be as secure as they think. More broadly, Omo says that they wanted to call attention to the wide gaps in US cybersecurity standards for consumer products. Securam locks are certified by Underwriters Laboratory, he points out—yet suffered from critical security flaws that will be tough to fix. (Underwriters Laboratory did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.) In the meantime, they say, safe owners should at least know about their safes' flaws—and not rely on a false sense of security. "We want Securam to fix this, but more importantly we want people to know how bad this can be," Omo says. 'Electronic locks have electronics inside. And electronics are hard to secure.'
Yahoo
29-07-2025
- Yahoo
1-week-old baby found alone in driveway of Orlando home, police say
The Brief An infant – estimated to be 1-week-old – was found in a car seat in the driveway of an Orlando home alone, police said. The infant is OK and was taken to the hospital, police said. The Orlando metro is under a heat advisory until 7 p.m. as temperatures are expected to reach into the mid-to-high 90s in some areas. ORLANDO, Fla. - A 1-week-old infant was found alone, strapped into a car seat, and left outside in the driveway of an Orlando home early Monday morning, police said. Police said the infant is "in good health" and has been taken to the hospital for treatment. Authorities are now looking for the infant's parents, and are asking neighbors to look at their surveillance video. Much of Orlando remains under a heat advisory due to the extreme temperatures, which have been in the 90s the last several days. The heat index – the feels like temperature – is expected to be over 100 degrees in some areas. Infant left in car seat in driveway of Orlando home, police say What we know Police said the boy – estimated to be a week old – was found around 7:20 a.m. outside a home on Lido Street, near Semoran Blvd. and Curry Ford Road, east of downtown Orlando. "He is in good health and is currently being treated at a local hospital," police said of the boy. Dig deeper The Florida Safe Haven Law was enacted in 2000 in response to an increasing number of newborn infants left to die in public places. It allows anyone in possession of an unharmed newborn, approximately 30 days old or less, to leave them with someone at Safe Havens: any hospital, staffed fire rescue station, or staffed emergency medical service station, with no questions asked. What they're saying "The Orlando Police Department reminds all parents and caregivers that the Safe Haven Law exists to provide a safe, legal, and anonymous option for surrendering newborns," OPD said in a statement sent to FOX 35 News, "with no questions asked, anonymously, and without fear of prosecution." A Safe Haven for Newborns is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to reaching pregnant girls and mothers before they reach the crisis stage. "We've helped moms, women as young as 13 and as old as 47 years old. So, and everything in between," said Nick Silverio, who is the founder of a Safe Haven for Newborns. "And this is not a minority issue. This is an issue that crosses all categories of age, ethnicity, and so forth." Where are the parents? Orlando police asking for help What you can do Police are looking for any information that could assist in finding the infant's parents or guardians. Police are also asking anyone who lives in the area to review home surveillance video or security footage for any potential leads. How to contact the Orlando Police Department: Orlando Police Information Desk: 407-246-2470 Orlando Police Non-emergency number: 321-235-5300 Crimeline: 800-423-8477 (TIPS). You can remain anonymous. The Source The Orlando Police Department issued a news release about the found boy and the search for his parents or guardians on July 28, 2025. Solve the daily Crossword
