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WebTV 911 Hacker... Cyber Terrorist?
Mastab286 writes "Federal agents have arrested David Jeansonne, 43, of Louisiana on cyberterrorism charges under the USA PATRIOT Act for a malware attack against eighteen MSN TV (formerly known as WebTV) customers. As part of an online conflict in July 2002, Mr. Jeansonne wrote a script to change the dial-up number of MSN TV equipment to the 911 emergency number. He disguised the script as a tool to change the colors of the user interface, and sent it to his eighteen foes; the next time they tried to log on, they would end up calling the police instead. Several of the customers sent the tool to friends, bringing the total number of victims up to twenty-one. The script also posted the users' browser history to a website and e-mailed hardware serial numbers to a free webmail account. Prosecutors charge that the act meets the definition of cyberterrorism since it endangered public safety."
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Denial of Service Attack against 911??? Maybe 911 should change their phone number just like SCO changd their DNS name to http://www.thescogroup.com/.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
but this relied entirely upon the studity of the user to not only run it, but manually propogate it to other people
They were using WebTV.....
. . . I had a BBS with call back verification call 911 (no, the author wasn't smart enough to program around it). Fortunately, I wasn't caught. More fortunately, I wasn't a kid during the PATRIOT Act's reign.
911 would really only have to worry about an extra 10-15 calls a day.
sent it to his eighteen foes
Wow, I don't know anyone who has WebTV and this guy knows 18, all of whom happen to be foes!
Oh yeah, and if you're dialing 911 for your internet access, how is the evil program supposed to post your browser logs to a website?
Some dude cut me off in traffic and because I am a law minding citizen I deem it was an act of Domestic Urban Terrorism. I was so frightened by the way they were driving. It put the fear and terror in to minds of anyone driving on that public throughfare.
"unless 911 are offering PPP services now!"
It doesn't seem to connect, you just get this gurgling tone from your modem, and in the background you can almost hear a little voice going "hello?..." or something.
Dit.. dee.. nEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... "sir?"
People, it isn't like he just affected one or two MSN TV users. He affected all 21 users of MSN TV.
Back in the late 80's in the era of BBSing, I called a friend up by voice. My call came onto her phone line simultaneous with her modem picking up the line to dial out to a BBS. So 'click' and suddenly my voice was coming out of her PC (out of the modem speaker inside it.) She was pretty freaked out, but we eventually figured out what had happened.
---
... Osias Griffin, who owned one of the first dozen telephones.
"Hello, Johnathan?"
"Nope. What number are you trying to dial?"
"Seven."
"Ah, well this is three."
Can you please explain to me how a modem could dial 911 and then connect to the internet anyway?
I'll break it into small steps so you might understand:
1) Take phone line off hook
2) Dial 911
3) Hang up
4) Dial normal internet connection number.
Was that too hard for you to understand?