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Stupid Hacker Tricks - The Folly of Youth
N_burnsy points out an article in Computerworld which "profiles several youthful hackers, some still serving prison time, some free, who have been caught indulging in some fairly serious cybercrime, and looks at their crimes and the lessons they have (or have not yet) learned.
Starting with Farid 'Diab10' Essebar, currently a guest of the Moroccan prison system, who wrote and distributed the Mytob, Rbot, and Zotob botnet Trojans. There's Ivan Maksakov, Alexander Petrov, and Denis Stepanov, all guests of the Russian penal system, sentenced to eight years at hard labor for creating a botnet to engage in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to blackmail online gambling sites based in the UK, threatening to take the sites down during major sporting events. Then there's Shawn Nematbakhsh who was a little too eager to prove a point about the electronic balloting system that the University of California employed to hold student council elections, by writing a script that cast 800 votes for a fictitious candidate named American Ninja." Not everyone on the list is exactly youthful, and the range of offenses shows how lumpy this area is both to the law and in public perception.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;193960399;fp;16;fpid;1;pf;1
steampunk web design
Your really insightful comments are overshadowed by your "gay" comments.
I have mod points and I didn't know what to do. I thought I'd give advice instead of modding:
Stick to the point.
I know I'm off-topic.
No - mod both you and OP down for posting without reading the article. He wasn't imprisoned. He had to pick up trash and pay costs. The system worked just about right.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
If I recall correctly, the kid used those 800 votes by using other people's names, and by doing so, removed their ability to vote in the election. So, perhaps not the best way to go about it.
Yes, he was such a noble crusader....
"I really wasn't making any point at all," Nematbakhsh admits, debunking news reports to the contrary. "It was a senior prank, a silly thing.""You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Except that he explicitly says he was doing no such thing in TFA:
"I really wasn't making any point at all," Nematbakhsh admits, debunking news reports to the contrary. "It was a senior prank, a silly thing."I'm willing to bet that he did that because he figured it would lighten his sentence (as sibling poster noted). It could very well have worked, too.
If he had really been interested in fixing the flaw, he could have brought it to the administration's attention in a much better way that would have avoided him having to do community service, and not screwed up the election.
No, and no. If he had brought it to the administration's attention they would probably simply try to suppress it because otherwise actual malicious people might figure it out and do something bad. And if the voting system was a simple largest-percentage voting system, adding 800 votes for another candidate would not affect who won the rest of the election, even if less than 800 other people had voted (in which case, of course, they'd have to ignore the obviously fake American Ninja and give the election to the second place winner).
Thankfully, nothing ever came of it, but it does show the tendency of institutions to punish those who are actually trying to help them.
Which just gives a great example of my above mentioned point. Except that getting everyone to re-vote (not that this is necessary) is not as easy as sending a bunch of new cards out.
Please disregard any grammatical errors in the above message. I normally perfectly English just well!