The Story of the Pedophile-catching Hacker

missing30 writes "A Turkish hacker seeding usenet groups with trojan horses has made it a habit to hunt down pedophiles trolling the groups. The cases go back to 2000, with the mysterious good samaritan responsible for several arrests. The man now has tacit approval from the FBI for his actions." From the article: "At the urging of Montgomery Police Capt. Kevin Murphy, '1069' eventually turned over more and more information that led back to a computer owned by Bradley Joseph Steiger, who had worked as an emergency room physician in Alabama. The hacker's finds included information from Steiger's AT&T WorldNet account, records from his checking account, and a list of directories on his computer's hard drive where sexually explicit photographs were stored."

Comments

playing devil's advocate

[iamhassi]

the trojan "it installs a backdoor in the victim's computer and can allow files to be extracted and a keystroke logger to be installed."

Sounds like you can extract and install files so how do we know he didn't put the files on there himself? For all we know these are guys on forums he doesn't like or ebay sellers who have done him wrong. This is a slippery slope and vigilante justice. These are hackers, they're not the most law abiding citizens, not sure if I'd trust a hacker to not install kiddie porn on some guy's PC for kicks, especially if he believes the guy has done him wrong.