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Two Europeans Indicted In US For 2003 DDOS Attacks
narramissic writes "In a continuation of the first successful U.S. investigation ever into DDOS attacks, Axel Gembe, 25, of Germany and Lee Graham Walker, 24, of England were indicted Thursday by a grand jury in Los Angeles, California, on one count of conspiracy and one count of intentionally damaging a computer system. The two men were allegedly hired by Jay R. Echouafni, owner of Orbit Communication, a Massachusetts-based company that sold home satellite systems, to carry out DDOS attacks against two of Orbit's competitors."
It takes a genius to hire a couple of people to do your dirty work. It takes even greater genius to accept money to damage computer systems, from a complete stranger who would never rat you out.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's a criminal investigation. If Company A vandalizes Company B, do you expect Company B to "bring their own evidence to court"?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Perhaps it wasn't that easy to figure out the real $ource of the attack. --I am very curious as to what may happen to Orbit though.
This seems like a good time to consider revoking Orbit Communications' corporate charter.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
and all they had to do was post a made-up "home satellite" article to slashdot.
Judging by the fact that the Grand Jury is in California, the crime was committed against a party in another state. Thus federal jurisdiction.
Based on the UK Govs attitude to bending over whenever the US Gov requests someone to be extradited I wouldn't want to be in Lee Graham Walker's shoes right now.
While I think it's a good thing that international cyber-vandalism (or whatever you want to call it) is being investigated in regular courts (instead of some super-world thingy), I think the most interesting part is the charges against Lee Graham Walker. According to the article, his crime was using IRC to chat with Gembe about the botnet's code. Now, I'm not a legal expert or even legal savvy, but that sounds like a charge that would easily apply to a lot of geeks who IM with geeks short on ethics. I don't think it's being misused in this case, but it does sound like a pretty wide net.
The government can't save you.
Lee Graham Walker, a British citizen, and the German malware programmer Axel Gembe have appeared in a federal court in San Francisco...
I'm guessing yes.
This article also notes that Gembe may have been the HL2 thief, and that he's been on the hook for this DDoS attack since 2006: this was just their (first?) court appearance for it.
I have no particular premonition about how this will all turn out. On the one hand, German courts were taking it easy on him as long as he straightened his life out... on the other, the FBI with its "first successful investigation" into a DDoS may wish to make example of. We'll see.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
You're wrong. Germany does extradite citizens, as long as a couple of conditions are met.
Specifically, the suspect must have committed a crime that is punishable in both countries, must not be tortured or executed after the extradition, needs a fair trial and so on...
The server was subjected to intentional unusual activities that caused a loss of business services. Is it actual physical damage? I'm not sure. I don't know what the legal definition the law is using.
Either way, they caused business loss using non-legal practices. "Physical" damage or not, they should have know this would've been the recourse.
One of my old co-workers decided to delete all the accounts on our Lotus server in China before he left (no, he wasn't trying to do us any favors either) the company. Sure, the "repair" was to reload the database from backup but that constituted damage under national and international law. He got nailed to the wall for it.
"Don't feel bad for me child; I'm the monster that hides under your bed."
that's why I went back and looked up the German Grundgesetz.
Artikel 16
(2) Kein Deutscher darf an das Ausland ausgeliefert werden. Durch Gesetz kann eine abweichende Regelung für Auslieferungen an einen Mitgliedstaat der EuropÃischen Union oder an einen internationalen Gerichtshof getroffen werden, soweit rechtsstaatliche GrundsÃtze gewahrt sind.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
"No German can be extradited to another country. The law can create a different arrangement for extraditions to the EU or an international court, as long as fair trial [rule of law] is guaranteed."
[not a german native speaker, apologies for any mistakes]
It really depends on the type of hardware involved.
One example - Limited write memory can be intensely overwritten until it's worn out and rendered useless, resulting in financial loss.
I don't know if it has anything to do with this case, or if any damage actually occurred.
Just speaking in terms of technicalities.