08.30
British Hacker Gary McKinnon is due to be extradited to the US for computer crimes. He faces up to 80 years in prison. At one point, it was looking like Guantanamo. And doesn’t have much to stand on for a defense.
Hacking into .gov? .mil? Like its some big thing… Shit I remember people trading passwords for any and all of those on IRC chat #shellz. (Give passwords to a bunch of newbies — used to be a last ditch way to cover your tracks)
Two of my friends were raided by the FBI for hacking into various government computers (back in mid-90’s.) You know — knock down your door type shit — and they confiscate all your computers. Even took my friends entire music CD collection. (In case any had computer data on them?) We were teenagers at the time. One of them was charged years later, and was able to make a deal. Probation and a $25,000 fine.
All of us avoided spending time in jail.
Whatever — thank God.
Moral of the story: Don’t crack into organizations that have an unlimited budget to find you.
Its interesting to watch many from the underground computer security circles, go on to be unusally successful…
- Sean Parker – founding president of Facebook, founder Plaxo, Napster
- Shaun Fanning – founder Rupture, Snocap, Napster
- Andrew Frame – founder OOMA
- Jeremy Schoemaker – founder AuctionAds, Shoemoney.com
No Guantanamo for them…
Recreational hackers and kooks are low-hanging fruit for feds. In both cases, they’re not keeping a particularly low profile and they’re talking about what they’ve done. I’m not sure what to think about Gary McKinnon. He may be a kook or may have invented the UFO shit afterwards to escape charges of terrorism and lighten his eventual indictment.
The US DOJ says he fucked up all sorts of stuff either through retardation or maliciousness. http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/mckinnonIndict.htm :
“The indictment alleges that Gary McKinnon scanned a large number of computers in the .mil network, was able to access the computers and obtained administrative privileges. Once he was able to access the computers, McKinnon installed a remote administration tool, a number of hacker tools, copied password files and other files, deleted a number of user accounts and deleted critical system files. Once inside a network, McKinnon would then use the hacked computer to find additional military and NASA victims. Ultimately, McKinnon caused a network in the Washington D.C. area to shutdown, resulting in the total loss of Internet access and e-mail service to approximately 2000 users for three days.”
Heh. I remember when Napster used to hang on #cDc getting programming tips from SirDystic.
Your list left out probably the single biggest name – Steve Wozniak.
Or if that is a little too old skool, there are a lot of more recent examples. For example Chris Klaus, founder of ISS (You know, the “we don’t hire hackers” security company, that just happened to be founded by and mainly staffed by #hack veterans). Used to beg us all for exploits on IRC, and now he is using some of the mega-millions he made off of those sploits to build a new computer center for Georgia Tech. Go figure.
Rock.
– Veg
[...] back — this was probably straight extortion. (And now hackers can even get prosecuted as terrorists… fuck that shit) I’m grateful I survived my teen years… but the social [...]