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Teen Phone Phreak Targeted by the FBI
Wired has an interesting editorial on the latest resurgence of the old days of phone phreaking and the latest phreak that is rising into the FBI crosshairs. The most recent hoax, "swatting", involves malicious pranksters calling police with reports of fake murders, hostage crises, or the like and spoofing the call to appear as though it was from another location. "Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth. If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive."
I love a good prank as much as the next guy, but sending the SWAT team to an innocent persons house? That's not that cool...
Why is he a challenge? If he broke the law, he broke the law, blind or not.
The justice system should be blind, so who cares if he broke the law.
For this he will (rightfully) be tried as an adult because this kind of behavior can cost real lives. (I'll get modded down for being a troll)
--sig fault--
I think this is more a sign that the telco's really need to look at phone security. If a teenager can STILL phreak, decades after it started.. Something needs to be done.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
if phreakers or hackers target the feds
but please don't target the local law enforcement guys. you're actively denying some poor shlub 911 resources who might need them in a real emergency
that makes you worse than anything you say you are opposing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because the phone system was originally a monopoly, it is not designed for network security. This is an example. PBX's can be programmed to report any originating phone number. I don't know the type of line that the swatter was using, but trusting the source to report the caller ID is due to AT&T not having to worry about connecting foreign equipment.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Instead of calling him a "prankster", a "hacker", etc. and then complaining that he is giving "the rest of us a bad name", why not call him what he really is?
A sociopath, a criminal.
When I was a kid and used to phreak..... um, I mean, when I heard about people doing this..... it was all about connecting to long-distance BBSes for free and downloading games. What this kid is doing is just sick.
There's hackers/crackers/phreaks, and then there's people who are just plain assholes.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Our police SWAT teams always comport themselves justly. Of course, due to cowardice of many American voters, they can now just bust in and start shooting without saying a word. If a few innocents have to die so that the retarded "take my freedoms and tell me I'm safe" can be shown how wrong they are, so be it.
:D
Of course, I'm betting it won't be my house...pretty good odds
Blar.
Calling up and making prank calls isn't phreaking.
Even spoofing Caller ID, while a possible phreaking tool, is now common enough today that it's trivial for almost anyone to do.
This is just some stupid punk kid making an ass out of himself and cost the police time and taxpayers money.
This is equal to screaming fire in a crowded theater.
Again, making prank calls to the police and emergency services is stupid, not phreaking.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In this particular story at least, no one was killed. Considering just how often SWAT teams kill innocents with their no-knock, shoot-first tactics, this kid is lucky he hasn't been implicated in a wrongful death (yet).
It seems to me that there is a big difference between phone phreaking to get free long-distance calls and spoofing phone numbers to bring SWAT down on an innocent family.
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from your militarized police force!
Blar.
Wired is so kind not to identify the juvenile...
Thanks to this reporting, anyone who knows him now knows what he did. This will follow him around forever.
Wired could have at least left the first name out and kept the story intact.
What ever happened to the good ole days where phreaking used to mean getting free long distance, free sex chat line and messing with the phone company?
Sending a SWAT team to someone's random house is not a juvenile prank, someone could easily get shot.
Now having a gay 1-900 line call a buddy back and thank him for his business, now that is a prank.
Stick to free 1-900 calls and messing with phone switches. Think before sending heavily armed, trigger happy police into a perceived hostile environment.
Though he may seem like just an ordinary blind 17 year old, he is considered by many to be the most dangerous man alive. If you help us apprehend a known felon, we'll just clear away your record... give you a fresh start.
It's not that the cops are busy with the prank, it's that the cops think they are walking into a violently dangerous situation and conduct themselves accordingly, placing the innocent victims in real danger. It sucks about him being blind but not as much as it would suck to wake up at 2 AM because a bunch of goons have smashed your windows and invaded your home, grab your gun and attempt to defend yourself, and get shot by the cops for your trouble. I have zero sympathy and hope his stay in the pen is as much fun as his pranks are.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I mean I don't disagree that we should shoot for better security, but the idea that the problem is that they don't have perfect security is stupid. Not that long ago, within my lifetime, E911 didn't know where you called from, you had to tell them. So phreaking them was as simple as giving a false address. What's more, it had been this ways for DECADES.
So while the telcos should work towards a better identification system, it isn't necessarily the easiest thing in the world to develop and deploy, especially since the phone switches aren't the world's most extensible architecture (new features often mean adding hardware, not just changing code). We have to accept that virtual security is just like physical security: It cannot be perfect and impenetrable. We can have better and worse, but just because a failure is found doesn't mean the security is necessarily bad.
Besides, I see a bigger problem in kids who think this sort of thing is ok to do.
Renewing your library books wasn't taking away life-or-death police resources that someone else might actually need.
I'll borrow a link from another poster that is better than the one I had.
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/
Hell, a 80-year-old grandmother was killed dead because the cops could just bust in with no warning and start shooting. Too bad the scum got the wrong fucking house. Makes me sick.
Blar.
If I break in to your house, and make no mistake I could easily do so, should you be prosecuted for not having secured your house well enough? Because unless you have extraordinarily good security, it really isn't hard to get by. You think a pin-tumbler lock and a simple alarm system do anything? Get real, trivial to get around. So should you be held accountable if I break the law and get in to your house just because you don't have superb security?
/. there seems to be this attitude with regards to digital security that if you can do it, it should be ok to do. It is all on the person who owns the system to make it completely invenerable. So I'm just wondering if you feel the same way about physical security, since I can say with 99.99999% certainty, yours sucks (since almost everyone's does). If you don't feel the same about it, why not? Why should it be ok to break in to a computer but not a house?
I am just trying to understand here, because on
This isn't phreaking, it's thuggery. The Coast Guard has a BIG problem with phony emergencies on marine radio, like at it's peak 2 or 3 pranks per week in the SF Bay Area.
When you get caught you are not released to the custody of your parents, they make sure you go to ass-pounding school.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Totally. Like this one time I haxored in my neighbors wireless router and then threatened someones life using their network. When the SWAT team showed up and cuffed my neighbor it was TEH AWESOME! Oh, wait, that never happened because I'm not a monster.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
If you're talking about the event in Atlanta, you've missed a few details.
They had a warrant, it was just obtained with false information from information provided by an informant who was know to be not credible.
The grandmother? She shot at the cops after they broke into her house. The cops were returning fire.
Yeah, the people that falsified information to get the warrant should be put under the jail. But don't lump all cops in with a few genuine baddies. Generally, they have a shitty job that pays poorly, and are doing their best to protect you and me.
They shouldn't have that power for arbitrary reasons. I would agree with you on that. But I don't think they should go after an armed robber and rapist who has already killed with a flashlight and mace. They need the powers when the situation presents itself.
That being said, I think they are using when it isn't necessary. And I think they are overly careless with it by getting the wrong houses and all. I don't think I read about the grandmother being shot down but I do remember a situation in Arizona (I think) where not only did they get the wrong house, but managed to catch it on fire and made the family watch their dog trapped on the second floor get burnt alive while hand cuffed and mocked on the front yard. A neighbor over heard a cop ask another if they should call the fire department in yet, and the reply was they don't deserve to have their shit saved.
This tells me that the cops did the swatt approach with the intent of somehow punishing the suspect in the process of his capture. They didn't even have enough competence to get the right house in the process. So yes, there is abuse. But I think instead of taking the tool away from them, they should have strict guidelines in when to use it, how it is used, with accountability for getting it wrong and hurting or damaging an innocent person. I don't think a telephone book lawsuit is enough, criminal charges and loss of job should be on the line for abuses and wrong houses and all.
I don't think that would be a useful legal trend. First of all, every security device (from software to padlocks to alarm systems) is imperfect. They will all fail at a certain point. They are marketed as providing a level of security: not infinite security.
Secondly, laws like that would only discourage companies from even trying. In the physical world, no company would be willing to undertake the legal liability for selling padlocks. In software, no company would be willing to sell security software (or any software at all if the law applied broadly). Alternately, software would cost a fortune (the liability insurance would be built-in). This would also kill free/open-source software, since they would have no way to pay for the liability insurance and legal bills that would result from a compromised vulnerability.
Ultimately the people in charge of data/computers must be the ones held responsible. If you store top secret files in a cheap file cabinet, it's not the fault of the file-cabinet maker when someone breaks the lock and steals the files. Similarly if a company poorly implements security software, that is their fault... not the software vendor's.
E911 doesn't use Caller ID. It uses the same set of signals that the phone company uses for billing, which are much harder to spoof.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Sorry if you have an ocular deficite, but thats still no reason to fuck with other people.
What he did relates to "phreaking" like burning down a server rack relates to "hacking".
There is a word for that kind of people. Its "sociopaths". Dont believe me? Look it up.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Please mod the parent up as high as it can go.
Having toyed with the telephone networks, back when it was "cool" to do when you were bored with irc... I know the difference between learning something new about the latest release of audix and making prank phone calls.
A decade later, as a volunteer fireman; looking at the weather report for tonight - forecast 10inches... I would like to think that the calls I go out on tonight are legit and not some punk kid making prank calls. Yes, my fridge is running. As a lieutenant, too, I would like to think that my men (and one manly woman) are rolling for legit reasons, too.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
You are missing the point. This has nothing to do with cops power, even if I agree that it might be excessive. This has everything to do with a person finding a way to direct that power in an illegal and dangerous manner. It'd be like finding a way to send powerful surges of electricity to your house and damaging your electronics -- you wouldn't blame the electric company for the problem, even if they were responsible for a system in which such a surge was possible.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Years ago a friend's stepdad was killed in Kansas City. The cops followed his stepdaughter (my friend) home from a party where drugs were present. An hour after she went home the cops busted into her house with flashlights and guns. Their uniforms were black. Well, the step-dad hears the ruckus and comes out with his handgun that he kept near to his bed. Without warning the police shot and killed him. AND, there were no drugs in the house and my friend had LEFT the party because drugs had been present. The cops busted into their house for NO legitimate reason. The family won a large lawsuit against the city and the police department for a wrongful death.
What if something similar to this happened after the blind kid called the SWAT in on somebody? I'd sue the crap out of this kid's family, their cousins, their cousin's cousins and anyone else whose name I had. I'd sue the folks that make the technology that allow 'spoofing' of the calls origin. I've read about phreaking and it could be stopped instantly if telecos went all digital.
This kid should have the privilege of prison cell for a few years.
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
Just wanted to know your few details didn't help your argument at all.
Have a nice day.
There is a war going on for your mind.
You would think so - if your source of information is Hollywood or tinfoil hat websites. In reality, they don't.
You know what happens when they do that? People die. Either the cop, or people involved in the struggle, or innocent bystanders.
The grandmother? She shot at the cops after they broke into her house. The cops were returning fire.
Um, slow down there buddy. If someone breaks into your house, its totally reasonable to shoot at them to defend yourself. How is she to know if they are cops or not?
Oh, yes, if the authorities get a realistic-sounding call about an armed, crazed gunman holding me and my family hostage in my home, I would feel so much better knowing they're sending a single officer to politely inquire instead of a SWAT team. Because if it's a false alarm, no harm done, and if it isn't--well, I'm sure a single police officer showing up on the doorstep couldn't make the situaton with that crazed gunman any worse.
Yes, having a SWAT team sent to the home of an unsuspecting family is bad and someone might get hurt, but if the officers are well-trained, people probably won't. I know that's not much comfort if something does go wrong, but I think I'd rather live with that than the results of them not taking a real situation seriously.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Are you going to sure the lock maker if I break in your house? All door locks I've ever seen are defective. I have yet to see the door lock that can't be picked. The high security ones are much harder, it takes an expert to do it (I can't) but it can be done. However even if you decide those high security ones are ok, almost all of the ones on the market are not that good. Regular locks are rather easy to pick (I can pick them). The kind you get at Home Depot and such are rather simple. For that matter, I needn't even bother. I can just get a key for them, which is easy since the blanks aren't controlled, and make a bump key. What's more, some of these same companies even make high security locks that are better, they just aren't sold through normal channels (or at normal prices).
So are you going to go and sue Kwikset or Schlage or whoever makes your lock if I break in? Should your insurance refuse to pay because you got a normal lock, instead of a high security one? Again I ask: Do you hold physical security to the same standard as virtual security (which like most geeks seems to be perfection), or is it different? If so, why?
Geez, you would think that on slashdot people would know the difference, this is prank calling, NOT phreaking. Phreaking is about getting free phone calls, not about causing a nuisance and most certainly NOT about sending swat teams out to third parties. A real phreaker would absolutly at no point consider causing harm to others (other then the phone company offcourse :P ) as even acceptable, let alone for it be the only goal.
This guy and others like it are at best doing prank calls and at worsed doing real harm to the people around them. How would you like to be really need the emergency services and find that they are out because some lunatic send them on a wild goose chase? How would you like it if swat stood on your doorstep.
What next, smashing somebodies face in and stealing their mobile is phreaking too?
Put this guy in jail, and if he is blind, well I am sure he can find a cellmate to show him the ropes. I am sick to death of the bleeding hearts, you do wrong, you go to jail. Just remember the thing about equality, all people should be equal for the law, and that means being blind or whatever doesn't get you out of jail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's fairly trivial to setup an asterisk box with a SIP client and make up any outbound caller-ID you want... It's a stretch to say that someone who does this is a "hacker" comparable to what someone could do with switch access... Being able to forward/unforward a phone arbitrarily from within a switch -- this is power. Does anyone remember the "Phone Masters" guys Zibby, Gatsby, etc? -- That's the most recent example of hacking/phreaking that I can think. This is some kid playing around with asterisk and making prank phone calls.
Thank god no one else is allowed to yell police during a home invasion.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Yes. You act as if you're not causing harm. If your house is broken into, the only reasonable thing to do is assume your life is in danger. What legitimate reason does someone have to break into your house? You act in a threatening way you should expect harm to come to you.
What do you think should happen? Ask them politely to leave? Do you think they break in to throw you a suprise birthday party?
Please, wake up. You're only as safe as YOU make yourself.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2007/12/02/2007-12-02_grandma_killed_and_grandson_stabbed_in_l.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2007/12/02/2007-12-02_grandma_killed_and_grandson_stabbed_in_l.html
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02042007/news/regionalnews/l_i__home_invasion_slaying_regionalnews_frank_ryan______and_c_j__sullivan.htm
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/cops-arrest-suspect-in-attempted-home-invasion/3555644578
>(Note to 2nd amendment types: your guns will not keep you free. If the government wants your ass, they're going to get it.)
Of course, the government getting one or two asses is one thing. Thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of asses - that's a bit harder to contain.
Ask the Vietnamese. Or the Mogadishuans. Or the Iraqies.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Oh, seriously. Just fuck off with the glorification bullshit already.
Just because there are holes in a system that he's inadvertently exposing through his exploits doesn't make him a hero any more than the Russian mafia are heroes for exposing flaws in the credit card system.
Morally, this tosser is no better than the scum who make phoney calls to the fire brigade and throw stones and objects at them. The consequences have the potential to be just as- and possibly more- serious.
Of course, this guy's a hacker- one of us, right. He's not some antisocial ned or chav from a council estate (who'd probably attack you and film it on their mobile phones). So that makes his actions alright, doesn't it? Way to go with the double standards.
Is he clever and talented? Probably, yeah, but since he's using his "skills" to fuck about with mostly decent people for his own amusement, fuck the prick and let him rot in prison.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Phreaking is a trivial offense. Calling ID spoofing isn't even illegal, and there's perfectly valid reasons to do it. Hacking the phone system to run silly pranks is likewise pretty much harmless - depending on the prank, it might be offensive, but it's highly unlikely to do any real harm. Done well, it can even be fun for the target. "Stealing" long distance service is at WORST, petty theft, and should carry an appropriately minor penalty - a few hours of community service and maybe a small fine.
Sending an armed SWAT team to innocent man's hours, on the other hand, is NOT trivial in any way! Neither is calling ambulances to nonexistent emergencies. There's 2 issues here:
1. The SWAT teams are being called to what they think is a deadly situation involving hardened criminals. The innocent homeowner hears someone break into his house and is quite likely to do what a LOT of people would do in that situation - grab the nearest weapon. If he happens to own a gun, he's probably going to at least load it and make it quite visible, and quite possibly fire it at the intruder. Not only will he get mowed down in a hail of a gunfire from the SWAT team, but he may very well unknowingly kill a cop before he dies.
2. Guess what happens when some random guy has a heart attack, and arrives 20 minutes late to the hospital because all of the ambulances are busy responding to pranks?
"Swatting" and phoning false emergencies are NOT harmless phone pranks. They can both directly and indirectly kill innocents.
Whether the guy bribes a cop to get a false swat report put out or hacks the phone system to do it is totally irrelevant.
Yes, there needs to be accountability.
Unfortunately the police thing they are the military, and they are not. There not trained nearly as well, their situation is different, there job is different and they are not in the military.
You hand cuff and and secure someone, you don't keep pointing guns at them, you have no reason to scream obscenities at them(this under NO circumstance can help anyways, it only confuses the situation by adding noise that gets in the way of actual informative communication.
When you are wearing no clear identifing marks, storm into someones home and get killed, that's YOUR fault, not the person who thought they were being robbed.
So you need accountability, and in the case where procedure was violated, or a procedure is deemed unreasonably, the law enforcement officer should go to court, and the dept. should be held liable of monetary damages.
make them think, and make the dept. think. Before being allowed to go, perhaps there should be someone whose job it is to review the information?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So, from reading this article, I can deduce the following:
We're looking for a blind kid, heavyset, with a shaved head. Lives on the East side of Boston. Has a single mother, older brother, younger sister. His last name starts with W. His birthday is April 7, 1990. His mothers name is Amy Kahloul.
Hey, Wired, great job of protecting this kids identity! Shit, not only could I track him down, I could probably get a credit card in his name with all that!
(Of course, I wouldn't, because I like having a phone. )
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.