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I'm curious what led to all the arrests. It's not that hard to hide your identity if you truly want to be anonymous.
Catch a weak link, offer them a deal in exchange for information that leads to the conviction of someone higher up in the organization, repeat until you make it to the top.
I suppose teenagers enjoy more freedom in Europe, maybe it's more appropriate there.
I am very curious as to the methods of how they caught him. Anyone care to guess, or know?
Well, since no one else is wading in here's what look like the usual suspects to me: - obvious digital connection (forgot to use tor / ipredator / hacked vpn) - timing attacks (keeping normal waking hours for his home country, using a vpn instead of tor) - word frequency attacks (since he wrote a lot of press releases, his word choices may have been cross correlated with a personal blog) - bragging to a friend - gett…
* setup numerous honeypot open proxies and tor gateways
* work with journalists to have all emails and communications forwarded
* isolate ddos clients and reverse-engineer command and control. surprisingly many of these trojans are poorly written and have security holes themselves
* setup numerous fake twitter profiles and provoking them into responses - things like posting images, replying, etc.
* setup fake hacker groups. stage defacements etc. in order to get in touch with them
* I would write a system that tracks and stores every bit of communication they make and plot out their social communication graphs and when they are talking, who to, etc.
* ask ISP's or proxy providers to grep for traffic patterns.
* get user-agent info from twitter, or provoke them into visiting a link, and possibly load malware. no browser is really safe in a targetted attack
* word/speech tracing. this is why 1337 5p34k was invented, so you can not be traced via your vocab/grammar/spelling/phrases etc. it doesn't take a large sample to start narrowing it down
probably more - haven't really thought about it, but when i did see that they started using twitter I gave them 3-4 months, tops.
I'm curious what led to all the arrests. It's not that hard to hide your identity if you truly want to be anonymous.
LulzSec isn't anything new, this kind of hacking has been going on since the 80s - they've just taken a different approach with the media. And snitching is always how hacker groups fall.
This is essentially how all law enforcement investigations work, actually. Drugs, hacking, graffiti, white collar crime, whatever. Get a good snitch and you'll get the whole organization eventually.
For computer crime do they have to be able to draw a direct line from the act to the person's computer? Also, does a persons computer legally mean they committed the crime? What I'm getting at is, could a group like LulzSec guarantee lighter sentences for themselves if a line could be drawn from the crime to the group but you couldn't determine who actually hit the keyboard?
In the US, they could be charged with "Conspiracy to commit ". > One important feature of a conspiracy charge is that it relieves prosecutors of the need to prove the particular roles of conspirators. If two persons plot to kill another (and this can be proven), and the victim is indeed killed as a result of the actions of either conspirator, it is not necessary to prove with specificity which of the conspirators act…
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You may not be able to arrest an idea, but you sure can give its owner more jail time for destroying evidence. What was he thinking?
I don't think anyone can claim the evidence was destroyed. All of their posts have been archived in many places.
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Hacktivists? These guys are breaking into private companies and stealing property. They're criminals .
Hold on, hold on, let me try to clear some things up. A criminal is a rigidly-defined adjective meaning an entity which breaks or broke laws. An activist is a rigidly-defined term meaning an entity which acts to further some idea and bring it to public perception. A hacktivist isn't well-defined, but we'll assume here that it's a form of activist. Now based on this, the Anonymous and Lulzsec hackers were hacktivists,…
But, what cause or idea have they furthered? Computer security? Social injustices? Tax evasion by corporate amarica? I can't find one other then their own personal enjoyment.
I can not point to a single action they have taken and describe it as "constructive." The issues they do occasionally allude to could be furthered much more successfully, legally and in a morally responsible fashion (respecting individuals privacy) by other means.
As for their harm, it is fairly self explanatory, but to make it clear, releasing innocent individual's personal information and encouraging others to use it to commit further crimes is most decidedly not neutral.
I don't believe LulzSec's actions helped anyone. If you think they did some good, please enlighten me, point it out. I can't see it.
Every time I read a story like this, I picture the opening sequence from "Hackers". I wonder if that isn't one of the most realistic portrayals (of anything) in that movie?
Yes, it was the only realistic part of the movie. It is a bit frightening to be woken up by a man pointing a shotgun in your face when you are 13.
IIRC, there was a well known NYC hacker who was getting ready for school, and was in the shower, when the SS burst in and the scene was loosely based on him.