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FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

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Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#31

Post by mrsteveman1 »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #6
woofcat wrote: post #5

I'm always curious at how these VPN providers aren't being hit with false advertising. They claim to keep basically no data about you. "You are Invisible – Even We Cannot See What You Do Online We DO NOT keep any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of the VPN IPs assigned to you, your original IPs, your connection time, the history of your browsing, the sites you visited, your outgoing traffi…

Them not keeping a record may be true... But the rsyslog was delivering the logs to *.fbi.gov And not retaining logs would still be correct. They said nothing about transporting them to the relevant feds.

And there's still real value in that, even if they work with law enforcement.

If you actually need a VPN, the last thing you want is for the service to create an opportunity, which wouldn't otherwise exist, for a malicious 3rd party to quietly obtain existing records of DNS queries, connections, and other traffic data.

By not storing the data in advance, the risk is reduced. A malicious actor would have to compromise the servers and either use one as a network tap to send the traffic somewhere else, or enable logging or other analytics locally.

Both are more likely to be detected than a one-time access or leak of data that was already stored.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#32

Post by jclay »

Nadya wrote: post #2

The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…

One important distinction could be that these were HTTP requests made on his account page or other. If he logs into the account to update billing, etc that would certainly be logged.

All of what is claimed in the statement would be possible even if we assume no logs are stored for the VPN Server they run, which makes no guarantees about access to their HTTP properties.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#33

Post by daxorid »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #7
Nadya wrote: post #2

The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…

Again, its easier to buy a cheap VPS in a country that is at odds with the one you're in. Then, any intelligence the other country gets will likely not be sent to the country of residence. Ally countries usually have extradition treaties, and have a greater chance of sharing intel.

Correlation is still quite easy in that scenario, unless you're sharing that VPS with a thousand other people.

NSA has your international traffic logged and timestamped. If you're doing nefarious activity from a non-MLAT country's IP, and you're the only one connecting to it from the US, it's a simple matter of parallel construction for domestic law enforcement to pop you.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#34

Post by vokep »

analyst74 wrote: post #23

Sometimes I feel the anonymity aspect of the Internet brings the worst out of people. If we didn't have anonymity to begin with, people would have not tried those kind of harassment. Or if they do, it'll be a routine case for the police as opposed to requiring substantial FBI involvement.

Anonymity is required to maintain freedom of speech. It provides a route for any adult to be the child that calls out the emperors new clothes.

The sad part is yes, it also enables bad people to do bad things without consequence, however, that is the bet that we make. That the bad people doing their bad shit, is a small price to pay to prevent bad people in power from doing very very bad shit

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#35

Post by ALittleLight »

Nadya wrote: post #2

The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…

I opened the document expecting to sympathize with Lin. In my imagination this was some FBI surveillance state overreach, or "cyberharassment" thing getting overblown.

Instead, reading through the allegations, Lin came off as abominable. Contrary to your conclusion that this shows the FBI takes cyber harassment seriously, it seems like law enforcement generally allowed Lin to publicly subject this poor woman to psychological torture for a couple years before doing anything about it.

Provided the allegations are true, whatever sentence he gets will not be enough...

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#36

Post by seibelj »

This guy is a monster. Read the whole thing if you have the time. For some reason this bit stuck out at me out of all the crimes: He hacked into her "Rover" account (Uber for dog walking) and messaged all her clients that she had a panic attack and murdered their dogs, and will deliver the dog to them in a ziploc bag.

Total psychopath.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#37

Post by iqy »

Nadya wrote: post #2

The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…

Why not just use Tor?

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#38

Post by LinuxBender »

iqy wrote: post #37
Nadya wrote: post #2

The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…

Why not just use Tor?

For some things, Tor works just fine. For some sites, Tor is either blocked, or may send you through endless captchas. At least, that has been my experience.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#39

Post by tjbarkley »

Animats wrote: post #10

Although much of the data seems to have been recovered from his work computer after he lost a job. This article is two years old. Current status, from US Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator: RYAN S LIN Register Number: 00578-138 Age: 26 Race: Asian Sex: Male Located at: Brooklyn MDC Release Date: 01/02/2033

I wonder where he worked and why he was terminated. It was probably a similar pattern of behavior at work.

Re: FBI affidavit against Ryan S. Lin in cyberstalking case (2017)

#40

Post by elliekelly »

woofcat wrote: post #5

I'm always curious at how these VPN providers aren't being hit with false advertising. They claim to keep basically no data about you. "You are Invisible – Even We Cannot See What You Do Online We DO NOT keep any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of the VPN IPs assigned to you, your original IPs, your connection time, the history of your browsing, the sites you visited, your outgoing traffi…

Their privacy policy looked very different at the time Lin was allegedly using it:

> We Do Not monitor user activity nor do we keep any logs. We therefore have no record of your activities such as which software you used, which websites you visited, what content you downloaded, which apps you used, etc. after you connected to any of our servers. Our servers automatically record the time at which you connect to any of our servers. From here on forward, we do not keep any records of anything that could associate any specific activity to a specific user. The time when a successful connection is made with our servers is counted as a “connection” and the total bandwidth used during this connection is called “bandwidth”. Connection and bandwidth are kept in record to maintain the quality of our service. This helps us understand the flow of traffic to specific servers so we could optimize them better.

They appear to have made the policy (and presumably connection logging) change in June 2018. For reference, Lin pleaded guilty to charges related to the criminal complaint posted by OP in April 2018. I would imagine PureVPN's lawyers had advised them to wait until the case had ended before enacting the new policy.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20170128142453/https://www.purev...

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