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Google Search Convicts Hacker

Posted by Zonk on from the scroooooood dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google search terms have helped convict a wireless hacker. The queries the hacker performed were introduced into evidence at court, where Matthew Schuster was charged with disrupting his former employer's wireless network and imitating other users' MAC addresses to obtain access. From the article: 'Court documents are ambiguous and don't reveal how the FBI discovered his search terms. That could have happened in one of three ways: an analysis of his browser's history and cache; an Alpha employee monitoring the company's wireless connection; or a subpoena to Google from the police for search terms tied to his Internet address or cookie. Google has confirmed that it can provide search terms if given an Internet address or Web cookie, but has steadfastly refused to say how often such requests arrive.'

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  1. Re:Hackers by necro2607 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    One of the best tricks I ever came up with was building my own HyperCard stack to launch whatever program I wanted, after discovering a pretty big bug in the school's "security" software. Our Mac labs had At Ease, and it would only have just a few "educational" programs etc. available to students. However, I found a really big vulnerability - you could take any program and simply change the creator code with ResEdit to match that of any one of the "allowed" programs, and it would then be allowed to run.

    So I'd take some various "tools" from the web (At Ease password cracking type stuff, mostly, and of course a copy of Bolo to play with friends over the LAN while we snuck in during lunch), change the creator codes to match SimpleText or Math Blaster or whatever, and build a HyperCard stack that would launch the programs for me.

    It got to the point where I was making "Bolo disks" (for all my friends) which included a copy of the game, some extra maps and a HyperCard launcher stack. I got a reputation as a bigtime hacker among everyone in the school (and I was 11 years old!), which was both good and bad - tons of awesome extracurricular stuff related to computers, but always seen with an eye of caution...