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Police swoop on 'Hacker of the Year'
AcidAUS writes "The Swedish hacker, Dan Egerstad, who perpetrated the so-called hack of the year, has been arrested in a dramatic raid on his apartment, during which he was taken in for questioning and several of his computers confiscated. Egerstad broke into the global communications network used by embassies around the world in August and gained access to 1000 sensitive email accounts."
There was an article a while back on slashdot, that mentioned about this guy who found a way to duplicate boarding passes for an airline... before he published the information to the internet, he contacted his congressman, which did nothing about it.. but then published how to do it, and the template to the internet. He was then considered a "terrorist" and I have heard nothing more about him.
Just me
I think the "sellout" part of those hackers is actually the part that grew up and realized (real - as mentioned above)hacking is not a way to support a family - and it will always be a hobby. As it should be, no?
From the article, paragraph 1:
The Swedish hacker who perpetrated the so-called hack of the year...From the article, paragraph 2:
Dan Egerstad, a security consultant, intercepted data carried over a global communications network...Emphasis mine. So what is he? If he's a hacker, the raid is just desserts. If he's a security consultant, and he's exposed this flaw, he's being persecuted. Frankly, I don't know what he really is, but it seems like the press is schizophrenic on this issue. It just goes to show that when it comes to technology, the mainstream press is a bit low on clarity and high on sensationalism.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
A bit too paranoid. He was told to shut up about it, but nothing happened to him. It was a journalist who'd found out that if you made two boarding passes at home, one in his own name (not conspicuous) and one in the name of Osama Bin Laden, and you switched bottom barcodes on them, you could get Osama on the plane. Or something. Apparently, the two barcodes are read at different stations, and only the first one checks for identity (but not the no fly list), and the second one checks for the no fly list (but not the identity). Or something.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This guy is a very good security consultant that has been around for a while. This is not the first leak he has discovered and tried to warn people, Dan discovered that his home DSL was going slow and started sniffing out the traffic from his ISP. He quickly discovered that the ISP sent him traffic from about 4000 other customers on 16 different subnets! He could see everything on the network. This very time he had setup a tor link and started sniffing out the traffic, just as NSA does in the US on their large tor links. What he found was countless passwords and other sensitive stuff floating around. He found large amounts of usernames and password floating by all the time. No doubt this was from a hacker/foreign security intelligence that used tor for anynomity. The fact that most passwords was from governments like Iran, Russia and other countries not in the US "group" suggests this was US spying in progress. The fact that Swedish "Säpo" (intelligence is not the right word for theese people) was pressured into action against something thats not a crime at all in sweden also makes one wonders what is going on. It seems people are dissatisfied that this leak was made public. I doubt the people being hacked was miffed at Dan for showing them that someone was spying on them. Now that they know and secure their communications, maybe with stringent encryption and backdoor free open source, i do now one country that will be angry.
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