DOJ: Russian 'Superhacker' Gets 27 Years In Prison (thedailybeast.com) 50
According to the Justice Department, a 32-year-old Russian "superhacker" has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for stealing and selling millions of credit-card numbers, causing more than $169 million worth of damages to business and financial institutions. The Daily Beast reports: Roman Valeryevich Seleznev, 32, aka Track2, son of a prominent Russian lawmaker, was convicted last year on 38 counts of computer intrusion and credit-card fraud. "This investigation, conviction and sentence demonstrates that the United States will bring the full force of the American justice system upon cybercriminals like Seleznev who victimize U.S. citizens and companies from afar," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco said in a statement. "And we will not tolerate the existence of safe havens for these crimes -- we will identify cybercriminals from the dark corners of the Internet and bring them to justice."
Re: Or worse, (Score:1)
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The only good thing about the AK-47 was that it was extremely reliable, and also extremely inexpensive to manufacture.
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I've never fired the AK47, only the AK74 and the AK101, but they were both perfectly serviceable at 300m. As a matter of fact, missing the shoulder and head target at 300m was automatic kitchen duty back in basic training, in '88.
I've used much more precise assault rifles... but they all had their problems - too much kick, too high of a rate of fire, and not one was nearly as easy to disassemble and clean as the good ole Kalashnikov.
For its purpose, the Kalashnikov is hard to beat at thrice the price. Of
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If you want to pick off a commie at 300 yds, it's not.
That's probably why they were manufactured like that: in case they fell into the enemy's hands and the enemy tried to use them against your communist comrades.
Re: Or worse, (Score:2)
So you are saying that they should have been mothballed even before the predecessor of its predecessor had its first flight? How is that even possible?
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Also, there are supersonic Tu-160 - only 16 such planes in active servive tho.
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This is journalism lingo for "he's not a script kiddie, and was successful at exploiting vulnerabilities on a large scale".
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I'm very apolitical and don't care about Trump or Clinton. Trump is the elected president and therefore it makes no difference to me if he has a low approval rating or if his approvals were to spike to the highest levels on record. The American people wanted him as their president. Russia poured a lot of money into his campaign, it is reported, but they could easily do that to anyone running so I see it as a fair playing field under the current rules.
If Americans lack critical thinking methods to distinguis
Separation of powers (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF? Since when is the Executive Branch doing the sentencing?!
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They only said he got sentenced, they don't appear to have said they were the one to sentence him. That would've been done by the court.
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Maybe they can sentence the OP to 20 years of remedial high school civics.
While not applicable to this particular Russian... (Score:1)
Since Guantanamo Bay and similar "extra-jurisdictional" prisons, starting about 2001.
Obama was droning people daily by the dozen... while the intended targets probably deserved it, the actual targets (mostly civilians/kids in Syria/Lybia/Yemen cannot even sue, cause they do not have "constitutional rights").
Somebody hurry up and get that man another Nobel Peace Prize, and get one for George W. while you are at it...
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WTF? Since when is the Executive Branch doing the sentencing?!
In Trump's America, the executive justices you! Or maybe the justice executes you.
Stupid credit card system (Score:2)
It's about time the US ditches its 3rd world credit card system and uses something better protected, like mandatory using the chip on the card with a pin code. No more transactions alowed with only the card number, verification date and a 3 digit number that is printed on the card.
Re: Stupid credit card system (Score:2)
Amex, VISA and Mastercard have a separate system to authenticate online user via an extra password, cookies and IP addresses. The system is called called 3-D Secure.
This is typically used together with Chip and PIN cards to provide an extra factor of security for both physical and online transactions.
A bigger question (Score:2)
When I see stories of credit card fraud, I have to ask a very simple question:
Why haven't card companies moved to make the fraud process less prone to being abused?
It's trivial to commit CC Fraud even with chips in the card, and it's not likely to have prosecution if you don't do it too frequently or too blatantly. Or if you are a large company. Further, the merchant is the one the frequently has to pay for the fraud, not the card issuer, even if the merchant has "run the card" and been validated.
On the fli
Bigger Hacks (Score:3)
So the neocons hacked the US government and started a war over nonexistant weapons of mass destruction, penalty, zero. The banksters purposefully ran a scam to inflate profits and their bonuses whilst cheating customers and investors of billions, penalty, zero.
The Russian broke the law, hacked computer networks and copied credit card numbers, which he then sold to criminals. Those criminals did the stealing, fraudulently using those insecure numbers. Compared to those other crimes with zero penalty, what is going on. I was surprised there was no claim of refusal to help or it appears any effort what so ever to get those criminals who used those credit card numbers (makes the whole thing stink of politics). I would have liked to have seen a reduced sentence, say minus a month for each prosecution the defendant helped to gain against the criminals who used the credit card numbers, or at the very least that effort made. Perhaps the Russian government would have cooperated but no politics seemed to have been the focus.
It seems a major opportunity to track down more Russian criminals was wasted, stupid as.
And after he gets out of prison... (Score:2)
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If anything, they just helped him find other criminals to make friends with. What a waist.
Are waist-sizes a specific thing in prisons?
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Wrong focus. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone involved is completely ignoring the fact that the companies involved were not properly secured. It doesn't take a "superhacker" to get past shitty security and we shouldn't be protecting companies with shitty security. Sure, punish the hacker but you need to also punish the executives that decided security shouldn't be the highest priority. When you put profit comes before security, you are asking, nay, begging to get hacked and that's exactly what happened here.
Re: Wrong focus. (Score:2)
Nonsense. It's not as black and white as that. They could invest every penny of their profit into security and still get hacked - what then? You make a decision based on the information available to you; in too many cases, the security team is unable to articulate the risk in terms that are clear and defensible to the executives, so they're just as much at fault.