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.

Comments

*sigh*

[circletimessquare]

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the people who are not getting listened to are not doing their jobs if they are not getting listened to. besides, we are talking about technological exploits, specifically unique exploits no one else seems to have gamed so effectively, not general anti-hacking professionals talking about anti-hacking strategies in general. so you're changnign the subject

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dude, you're changing the subject. i said look at the example of frank abagnale. what is interesting about that SPECIFIC example? frank abagnale made specific powerful technological innovations.

"The crooks who I've dealt with have mostly been good at social engineering"

FAIL. i'm not talking about those crooks. stay on target please

i am talking ONLY about hackers who do the same thing as frank abagnale. if something they do involves only social engineering, you are 100% right to say they are no different than 500,000 other blokes and jail... and you are also talking about people i am not talking about!

so you haven't countered my point, you've merely misunderstood the subject matter

Getting society to listen to the people who are pointing out the holes, often for years before the crooks decided to use them, is a better way to solve that problem

now it is my turn to change the subject: it is kind of a meta-level joke to comment on crooks with social skills... and then complain that no one listens to people pointing out the holes. do you get the joke?

a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you. you don't wave a magic wand and get people to listen to you, you don't issue a governmental edict and people listen to you. you phrase what you have to say in such a compelling way that people want to listen to you

so it sounds like you could use some help from those common blokes in jail, nevermind the technologically astute ones ;-)

the responses keep getting bigger

[circletimessquare]

i think i am pissing you off

i know this dance. now you respond less on logic and reason, and more on the spirit of stubborn resistance. not an interesting conversation

i've made my points. accept them, shut the fuck up, move on little kid

xoxoxoxox