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CEO Indicted for DDOSing Competitors
ruland writes "It turns out there was a reason the hosting company CIT/Foonet was raided in February. SecurityFocus.com reports that the CEO of a web-based satellite T.V. retailer has been indicted for allegedly paying Foonet's administrator to arrange denial of service attacks against his competitors, causing outages as long as two weeks at a time, and $2 million in losses. Now he's skipped out on $750,000 bail, while the five packet monkeys who worked for him are left facing felony charges of their own."
what a bunch of retards.
If your boss tells you to do something illegal, they'll arrest him *and you*. When he skips bail, you'll be left holding the bag.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
That brings a whole new meaning to "cut throat copetition"!
What kind of company DDOS's competitors?
Cheers,
James Carr
Yea, you can trace them back to the zombie pc's but when your talking about 10,000 or more thats a quite a bit of work, also alot of those isp's are out of the country.
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
From what I understand, the authorities marched in and took down systems which hosted a great many people's data. Whatever the administrator might have done, the vast majority of the people hosting sites on the hardware were innocent. They lost data and money. Perhaps the collateral damage was necessary to prevent evidence from being altered or destroyed, and perhaps it was a question of uneducated, incompetent and/or overzealous authorities. Just becase an actual crime was being investigated doesn't mean that any and all actions taken by the investigators are summarily justified.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Now he's skipped out on $750,000 bail, while the five packet monkeys who worked for him are left facing felony charges of their own.
Executives pulled this stunt with stockholders quite heavily over the last 5 years. I imagine that he didn't actually pay out $750k but probably put up "collateral" with an appraised worth of $750k. It doesn't mean much if he's been cutting his own salary, stock options, and other investments at several million/year.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
" it's a thief pure and simple"
No, its not. I hate to be pedantic, but this kind of imprecision allows the RIAA/MPAA to call copying CD's "theft".
If we use language that is neutral, it allows us to evaluate the best course of action to take. Using emotionally loaded terms forces us to make emotional decisions rather thanlogical decisions, and that is not a wise thing to do.
I'd rather be unemployed and searching for a job for a good long while than being in federal PMITA prison for PACKETING someone. The packeters deserve whatever they get, because frankly, I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to get DDoSed. If you can't get the upper hand through legitimate tactics and methods, then you don't deserve to be in business. Go flip burgers or something.
No, no, no. Anytime something happens in technology, people start clamoring for new laws. Then the special interest groups get involved, and then we end up with a law that is worse than the crime it is intended to prevent. Like, say, I dunno, the DMCA. There were plenty of laws about copyright infringement already. It was already illegal to take a camcorder into movie theaters and make tapes to sell on the street corner. All they had to do was extend that to the Internet. But isntead we have the DMCA.
I'm sure there are laws about interfering with commerce already. Just ammend them to include DDOS attacks. If we start writing new laws, they'll get more and more restrictive and before you know it, hitting Reload on a page more than twice in 5 minutes will land you in jail for cyber terrorism.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Let's say I steal $1000 and put it in my business's client trust account. The cops figure it out and put a freeze on my account. Now the rest of my clients can't get their money. Who's to blame?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I remember back when it was published ... all about how the FBI was just oppressing innocent geeks, it was all Bush and Ashcroft's fault, and the FBI were violating the 1st amendment etc.
Now maybe slashbots can realise that not every 'hacker' is a hero who's been oppressed by Da Man.
Mod parent up, that's exactly what I thought.
What kind of moron doesn't think a big DDOS like that is going to be traced? The reason everyone gets away with it with MS and SCO is because everyone hates them, so there are too many suspects...But when its your biggest competitor? You're going down.
And then to skip bail? "Noooooo please don't send me to white collar CEO prison for a week. Waaaaaaah."
This is almost too dumb to make a Dilbert strip.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's like the soldier who's ordered to commit war crimes. What do you do? It's in no way you're fault - but you're in a lose - lose situation.
Yes, it sucks, but ultimately you AND your superiors are responsible. It is better to be punished for doing the right thing than to do the wrong thing and be rewarded. Cowardice and fear are no excuse for committing injustices or allowing them to be committed.
Oh, and regarding your sig: al Qaeda endorsed Bush.
The company's hosting provider, Lexiconn, responded by dropping WeaKnees.com as a client, sending the company to more expensive hosting at RackSpace.com.
Does this make any sense? I can see if your legitimate traffic is exceeding a bandwidth limit that you might get dropped/forced to pay more. But a denial of service attack? Wouldn't most service providers want to help their customer with this kind or problem?
new laws? what the fuck for?
it's already illegal. it's already criminal to disrupt someone others communications knowingly.
you don't need new laws when you could just apply the old laws, stupid criminals think that an old law doesn't apply if they just use a new device in the crime - it's a stupid excuse that does not pull through.
it's not pure simple thief either, but there's been laws in civilised countries against disrupting someone elses telecommunications for quite some time(decades at least if not centuries in one sense or another, you think it was legal to steal mail ever?) and the same laws apply.
the lesson of the story is that if you take money for hitting someone you're just as responsible as the fucker who hired you to do it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I remember this story back in Feb with all the conspiricy people coming down on how the "FBI has overstepped their bounds again" and calling it another Ruby Ridge or Waco.
Click on the original story and even THAT makes it seem like they were just innocent people being unfairly picked on by the evil overlords known as the FBI.
If FBI agents showed up at your data center bearing a warrant, would you be able to provide them prompt access to customer data? BZZZZT! I'm sorry, but you've taken too long to answer. We'll be confiscating all the hardware you use, er, used to use, to run your business. But we'll get it back to you 'real soon now.' Thank you for playing.
Now it turns out the people raided were in fact "the bad guys" and the warrent (remember, the FBI HAD a warrent) was legit AND...er...warrented.
It's funny how everything changes when more facts are thrown in...and I'm sure not all the facts are even in yet!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
And, just how were they to know the comps were unrelated to the charges before they investigated them? Youre anger is misplaced. Point it at the felons.
The levels of bad feeling now are so much higher than they were before. It's foolish to move in and screw things up over there, especially when you have no concrete plan, and no concrete reason.
9/11 was planned by Bin Laden, and his grudge with us dates back to the '70s. Probably somethign to do with the fact that we used him against the soviets and then left him in a bombed out wasteland of a country.
They don't forgive and forget, but despite that we just romp around fucking with things, and pretend like the only consequences are the immediate ones. We're going to be paying for Bush's ego and Bush's oil cronies for decades to come.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I remember how times have changed... all about how the 1st amendment was oppressing the innocent FBI, it was all geeks fault, and slashbots were violating Bush and Ashcroft etc. Now maybe Da Man can realize not every FBI hero has been oppressed by hackers.
On a more serious note, there is such a thing as innocent until proven guilty, and people shouldn't say that the end justifies the means. We have to protect everyone's rights, even the rights of criminals. I know it sucks, and it would be great if we knew right away if someone was guilty, but in real life this is the only thing that approaches justice.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Thats not at all what happened. A hosting company - much like an apartment complex in many ways - had several bad customers, and the CEO that bought the hosting company was bad.
Might I make the suggestion that if you were hosting anything with a company that has the reputation that Foonet had that you should have seen this coming and deserve what you got? Hell, let's take it a step further -- would you host any mission critical data with an "IRC hosting provider"?
So the equivalent would be seizing EVERYTHING in EVERY apartment that CEO rented out.
Would you run your business out of an apartment building filled with meth labs and crack houses? That would be the equivalent to hosting with these people. Think about it for a minute.
I'm usually the first one to jump on the Ashcroft justice department (and watch Ashcroft use this as an excuse to push Patriot Act II) but sometimes they are just doing their jobs).
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I prefer the term "router jockey," myself.
:)
-nB
that tends to imply skill. The monkey reference is negative in it's connotations. So IMHO if you are a Router Jockey I will enjoy working with you, if you are a [field of work] monkey, I'll likely consider the worse of the two alternatives of hanging myself with cat5 from a ladder rack, or bludgeoning you to death with a sufficently massive object (box you just mis-configured, my desk, etc.) or maybe a death of a thousand cuts from bare single mode fibre lashings
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
it was still a crime and they knew that, they knew they were criminals and they knew that they weren't even some little jaywalkers or song downloaders. they were either stupid or they knew they could get busted big time for doing something like that for profit.
and I understand, they were willing to take the risk of getting busted to get the few bucks, there's nothing strange about that actually. however, when you do that you take the risk of getting busted and sent to jail - that's how things work. it may have been worth the getting busted, hard to know if they really were in a hole and really needed to do this(probably not, probably were just acting as good proles without thinking at all in which case they deserve it nonetheless).
(and it's still illegal==wrong, also they were hosting spamming and other bile)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The problem is, you only hear about the ones they don't catch.. the news can't sensationalize the good stories, only the bad..
having had an acmeshells account (and having been a helper for them at one point) i know that they are legit. one person trying to run a legit business ran over by some script kiddie trying to make himself popular by hacking, yeah i'd definately go to the script kiddie. if jeff had some kind of ftp junk going on the side, that would be something he kept in personal business. he does not mix business with pleasure. (except for the sheep)
RapidSatellite.com, which sells satellite TV receivers, was hit at the same time and with similar results. The company responded by quickly moving their electronic storefront to the distributed content delivery services of Speedera, only to be crippled three days later by an attack on that provider's DNS servers, which for an hour also blocked access to other Speedera-hosted sites, including Amazon.com and the Department of Homeland Security, according to the FBI affidavit. RapidSatellite then moved to Akamai, but were out again within a week when the attackers switched to an HTTP flood attack, running massive numbers of queries through RapidSatellite.com's search engine.
I'm not being cynical, but realistic. How much you want to bet the FBI didn't really get involved until either Amazon.com or the Department of Homeland Security's resources got peripherally hit?
Every day there are thousands of DDOS attacks going on, usually against small providers or companies that don't have enough political clout to get the authorities to care much. The perps biggest mistake was probably targetting a provider that had some more substantive clients.
I was one of foonet's customers and have now talked to the person at the FBI that I was supposed to, AND asked for his supervisor's name because he wasn't doing anything to help me. Supervisor never called me back.
Any suggestions on what I can do?? Lawyer?
I know this because I know the admin of the place through a friend, and he also had his personal server taken by the FBI as part of the raid. It was later returned to him, but at the time we were all angry because we thought it was unjustified.
What caused you to change your mind?
Have you examined the original information used to obtain the warrant?
The fact was we didnt have all the information(which later it was told to me they were investigating DDoS attacks, which turned out to be true).
What they were investigation in and of itself doesn't justify a seizure. Only the information (reasonable grounds) they were acting on can justify it.
And you don't know what that is without looking at the original affidavits.
And if you have never examined the affidavits, then your current believe is more of a matter of faith rather than an objective conclusion.
With that said.. I'll say it again. I'm not saying anything wrong was done.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
As for Waco...the people involved were definately `bad guys'...
I'm sorry, what? People who chose to live life differently were therefore "bad"? Or did you fall for the 'Saving-Our-Asses' lies and propaganda about child-molesting and other such nonsesnse pumped out by the FBI and Janet Reno?
Did the 90 or so woman and children who were burned alive deserve that fate for daring to forego such good ol' American virtues as Britney and Reality TV (or their mid-'90s equivalent)? Oh right, yeah, "They had it coming!", and "They shouldn't of oughta bin there in the first place!", right?
Why is it that if you choose to live apart, outside the mainstream, many people assume you must be "bad" and "up to no good", and should be reigned back in at gunpoint as soon as possible?
He should have just used us to slashdot them by posting a how to tutorial on installer a linux server in your skull! With color pictures!
$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)