Two 19-Year-Olds Charged With Running Phone Harassment, Hack-For-Hire Sites (arstechnica.com) 36
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors have charged two 19-year-old men with running "hacking-for-hire" websites that attacked companies worldwide and did business with international hacking groups "Lizard Squad" and "PoodleCorp." Zachary Buchta of Fallston, Maryland, and Bradley Jan Willem van Rooy of the Netherlands, have both been charged with conspiring to cause damage to protected computers. Buchta walked out of federal court in Chicago yesterday after being released on bail. He was arrested earlier but released on his own recognizance. The judge ruled that Buchta can live with his mother in Maryland while he awaits trial, but he won't be allowed to access the Internet or have any contact with van Rooy. As for van Rooy, he was arrested in the Netherlands last month and remains in custody there. The allegations against Buchta and van Rooy are among the first US charges related to Lizard Squad. The site that first got the feds' attention was phonebomber.net, which allowed paying customers to purchase a barrage of harassing phone calls directed at chosen targets. The phonebomber.net website charged just $20 to initiate the harassment, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Police say the two worked together with other members of Lizard Squad to run additional websites that trafficked in stolen credit card numbers and offered hacking-for-hire services alleged to have caused thousands of "denial of service" attacks worldwide.
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Number one rule: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
cue the "boo hoo, he was just using a computer" chorus.
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Well, head on over and let us know how it's going in the socialist paradise. Just don't accidentally get in front of any AA guns.
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Hackers (in terms of the general criminal hacking) is just a scummy crime. Akin to shooting randomly in the street. Sure most of the time no one will get hurt, but sometimes people do. You are trying to target an Evil bank. Well those servers are in the same data center as a hospital. So you DDOS attack prevented timely movement of health information so your parents who were in the hospital may had to wait 5 minutes longer for that critical result that could had saved their life, if they got that data ea
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Re:Noobs (Score:4, Insightful)
Most criminals, especially young ones cannot deal with what is required for that: Don't brag, don't get greedy, keep your ego in check, etc. One reason is that smart people realize that most crime does not pay in the long run and that the crime that does (running a bank, becoming a CEO with excessive compensation, etc.) is very hard to get into.
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The point in general is taken, but as applied to bank CEOs - it's getting hard to name a major international bank that hasn't been fined hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in the past 5-10 years.
Why is it the CEO gets credit (in the form of utterly MASSIVE - tens to hundreds of million - bonuses) for bank profits, but no punishment when the bank commits wholesale fraud, laundering, or other crimes that collectively screw investors and customers out of BILLIONS?
Why shouldn't populists be absolutely
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Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.
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It's because we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a managementist society. For a variety of reasons (risk, diversification, buying power), people have been convinced to chop up their "capital" into tiny bits so they really have any say in how it's used by the people who use it.
Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.
Eh, both of those statements pretty much ARE the definition of capitalism. I don't think most people understand the origin of the term of the philosophy. Back in the 1500-1800 range when capitalism really started taking hold, capitalism ie. private ownership of the major means of production was as much or more in the hands of a few rich people as it is today. If anything, the 20th century was the most non-capitalist period in modern world history - the (upper) middle class had investment power, unions an
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If you read this whole book, you will really be surprised at how similar things are to the things happening in our lifetime. I was.
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Read a bit, realized it's useless and I don't care, which I guess is the whole point, old boss same as the new boss, won't get fooled again...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Well, it seems to me that running as a "business" you have to advertise somehow, which inevitably is going to leave a trail back to you.
Also at krebsonsecurity.com (Score:2)
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Forget Larry, how about we indict Satya Nadella on the same charges. "Conspiring to cause damage to protected computers" is his company's entire business model.
"but he won't be allowed to access the Internet" (Score:2)
"but he won't be allowed to access the Internet"
How exactly is that enforced nowadays?
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Reporting Offshore Computer Crimes. (Score:3)
This multi-national prosecution tends to prove the value in reporting offshore computer crimes. You can report them locally but it can be far more beneficial to report crimes coming from overseas to overseas criminal investigation agencies. Now many would think there is no value in reporting those off shore crimes as nothing will happen but that is not true. Whilst those investigatory agencies might not do much to pursue the crimes against you, they will still likely kickoff an investigation to target the accused individual because the likely reality is, they will also be committing crimes in that region as well. So whilst you might not get direct justice, you can still get indirect justice, better some justice than none.
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This multi-national prosecution tends to prove the value in reporting offshore computer crimes.
On a related note, and not sure why it hasn't made Slashdot yet as we often rail against it, but just a few days ago in India several hundred people were arrested for operating call centers running those IRS scams (because we all know the IRS attempts to collect back taxes by using Indian call centers /sarcasm). So it does happen occasionally.
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When will Donald publish his personal emails? The world awaits with baited breath.
this will not go well for them. (Score:2)
they should prepare for disproportionate punishment because poking the 800 pound gorilla never ends well. i mean, they probably would get less time if they just murdered someone.