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Hacking Neighbor Pleads Guilty On Death Threats and Porn
wiredmikey writes "Another good reason to make sure your wireless is secured! 'Barry Vincent Ardolf of Blaine, Minnesota pleaded guilty to hacking into his neighbor's wireless Internet system and posing as the neighbor to make threats to kill the Vice President of the United States. Just two days into his federal trial in St. Paul, Ardolf stopped the trial to plead guilty. According to the US Department of Justice, in his plea agreement, Ardolf, 45 years-old, was indicted on June 23, 2010, admitted that in February of 2009, he hacked into his neighbor's wireless Internet connection and created multiple Yahoo.com email accounts in his neighbor's name." Ardolf's guilty plea included child porn possession, as well as the death threats.
First post! ...(from my neighbor's IP address; so mod him down, not me)
Some were yelling one thing, some another. Most of them had no idea what was going on or why they were there. Acts19:32
Death threats against the vice president, breaking into his neighbor's wireless... But no, he didn't stop there. Child porn.
I wonder if some company that has a wireless security technology hired this guy to make their product look necessary.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Aw come on dude...child porn too? Gross.
Local music(to upstate NY). http://gnarfel.com/ radio.
To be fair, the governor of Minnesota at the time the emails were sent (Tim Pawlenty) is a Republican, and the only sitting senator of Minnesota was Amy Klobuchar (Democrat), as Franken's win was not yet certified in February 2009. This was not partisan, this was simply him hating his neighbor.
Addendum: How much legal headache did his neighbor go through before Ardolf was suspected? The article doesn't say
In all fairness, I live in Minnesota. I can vouch that there's just not much else to do around here in the winter.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
wonder how he got caught...
Why the vice pres. If he's going to go that far why not go all the way?
Connecting to a wireless router usually means obtaining IP settings via DHCP. In the process, the MAC address of your network adapter (which is supposed to unique) will be recorded on the router, at least for some period of time. Therefore, if you want to connect without leaving an obvious fingerprint pointing back to your computer, first modify the MAC address that your network card is putting out. On Windows machines, drivers often provide a way to specify your MAC address under the "advanced properties" of the adapter. On my Intel network adapter, for example, the setting is listed as "Locally Administered Address", and is undefined by default.
You might even spoof a specific make of network adapter by choosing an "Organizationally Unique Identifier" from the OUI Public Listing.
The neighbors suspected the guy right away. Fortunately, the investigators listened to the [innocent] neighbors and started looking at the real bad guy.
http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU
What I don't get is why so many folks let themselves uniquely be turned into raving lunatics about politics - especially given how important the issues are to them.
Because the law is fucking insane. For instance, we live in a country where it's considered an appropriate and measured response to throw someone in prison, and confiscate their home, for growing a plant that's some people disapprove of. How do you deal with that rationally?
If you have a mission, and that mission is important - you need to focus. Turning explosive (figuratively, or literally when you mix in religion) might seem a good way to get attention on something that is overlooked - but if you pay any attention to how political events turn out, it rarely has a positive net effect.
The problem is, nothing really has a positive effect. It's been a steady slide down towards authoritarian corporatism for all of my 30 years in this country. Every last tiny shred of hope has been crushed out of me. There is no chance for change besides another American Revolution. Unfortunately, I don't see it coming in my lifetime. All I can do is keep my head down and try not to get caught up in the machine. If anything, I'm surprised we haven't seen more people flip out. The situation definitely calls for it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Politics is Professional Deal Making, where the name of the game is getting your cut of the proceedings. Actual "fairness" is only used lately when it seems like a useful strategy, oherwise Big Money wins 1-0.
People get freaked about poitics because it's fuzzy judgement zone where the best sneak wins.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Likely all his computer equipment confiscated for evidence, some good ol' police questioning (think how bad you would be treated if the police know you were downloading child porn) and of course his local reputation tainted by association with the case.
Of course once forensics failed to find corroborating evidence on his PC that he did the crimes, they would have immediately gone into 'this is a frame up' mode, and he would have been questioned further in regards to who would have a motive to having him arrested.
Until all the paper work is done, the 'I's dotted and the 'T's crossed, he will be without his computer gear, since it would be evidence in the case still.
WPA security is not rocket surgery! ;)
...
I'm assuming a bit. He's going to get hauled in for questioning, his computer(s) forensically searched, and in general live under a cloud for at least a few weeks. My assumption is that the search found nothing, so the cops dug a little deeper. All they really need to do is sit there watching the WiFi router's registrations (pretty much every WiFi router I've seen released in the last decade shows DHCP and WiFi registrations), and then watch what the neighbor is up to. Still, the first assumption the cops are going to have is that the guy with the WiFi is the one downloading the child porn and sending out the death threats, so the onus is going to very much be on him to prove to the cops that he's innocent.
Of course, if he and his neighbor had some sort of an ongoing feud, he may have just told the cops "It wasn't me, but the fucking asshole beside me has been harassing me for some time." If he had some other evidence that he and this guy had had troubles, it could have shortcircuited the whole process and set them on the neighbor's tail in short order.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
His threats against Biden had nothing to do with politics. Had it been McCain in office Palin would have gotten the death threat instead. It seems that he wanted revenge against his neighbors and was sane enough to understand that the local cops were worthless in matters of cyber crime and wanted to insure that semi-competent agents of the law got involved.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
He's getting jail time for unauthorized access, he used software to overcome the security of the router. I would agree with the media that it is close enough to hacking. Now had he stumbled on his neighbors' (open) wifi while trying to connect to his own and gotten busted for child porn I would say the term hacking is a bit much.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It wasn't an unsecured access point.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Find me a judge who'd consider this content secure and you might have a case. Sucks to be ignorant, doesn't it?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Is that this fool will be sucking some sausage sammich in prison before long. His lawyer may be able to plead out the pedo rap (honestly I just downloaded it from the internet so I could make my neighbor look bad)but I don't think they will ignore this in jail. Sucks to be him but that's what happens when you let your malice get the best of you.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I did not say that, and I do not believe that it was implied in my post.
Thank you.
Install TOR on your computer. Then you can have all kinds of random illegal traffic going through your net connection and blame (most of) it on strangers.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Yeah because using a bunch of prewritten programs and a livecd made by someone else makes you a total 1337 h4x0r, right?
No, it just means that you're not a complete idiot, and you're aware of the basic steps that you should take if you don't want to be tracked down.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
I think it was pretty obvious when he was supposedly sending death threats to the vice-president's office using his full name...
or when his co-workers asked him "uh - why did you write that email to me last night?".
Don't be so quick. Many innocent people plead guilty because they've been poorly advised by a public defender. A plea of guilty doesn't mean the person was guilty. It means that a deal was offered and the suspect had no faith in his defense at trial.
Where does it say he had a public defender?
He'd refused a more favorable plea deal last summer, insisting on fighting the government's case against him. But after two days of trial -- including Thursday's testimony from expert witnesses who showed the elaborate means Ardolf used to harass and smear neighbors who'd once called the police on him -- he stopped denying what he had done.
"The reality of it became apparent to him that this was going to happen and he didn't want to perpetuate his own distress or the pain for the victims," Ardolf's lawyer, Seamus Mahoney, said Friday. Vengeful neighbor in Blaine pleads to Biden threat, hacking
Seamus Mahoney is a criminal defense attorney with a state-wide practice in Minnnesota.
take me
Currently living in this town, nice to see some publicity on Slashdot. Come visit we have water slides (Summer only)
Effing kidding? You know who you're dealing with, right?
First, you're dealing with a police that can, with 2 weeks training, find the "on" button on a computer. They see:
1. Hate mail to prez.
2. ISP says it's him.
3. cuff him, seize everything and his dog and have the geeks in the basement of the office sieve it.
4. interrogate him 'til he cracks.
They have no idea what WiFi is and that it can actually be used by someone who isn't you. The computer freaks at the ISP said it's your computer that sent it, so it's your computer that sent it. Of course they said that it came from the IP of this subscriber, but ... IP, computer, router, WiFi, toaster, it's YOURS so YOU'RE IT!
And should this ever go to court, you're facing 12 people who have about as much a clue of WiFi deciding whether or not you go in the slammer.
Now decide: Put your faith in these computer illiterates or WPA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know you are joking, but you are only half-joking.
Seriously, is /. a high school male locker room where everybody is obligated to use profanities, or abbreviations of them?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
My neighbor on one side of me has an open WIFI connection (apparently) as the grandson of my other neighbor walks into my backyard to pickup the signal with his iPOD. Last night he was sitting in a plastic chair in the middle of my yard in six inches of snow and freezing cold out so he can acquire a connection and do whatever it is he is downloading/reading for hours at a time.
I have decided to stay out of the situation as my neighbor has the right to have a non-password protected access point if he desires... however the interesting thing is he works as a guard in a prison system so depending what the teenager is downloading could create havoc for him if an investigation is ever performed.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Ardolf faces a potential maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the distribution of child pornography charge, ten years on the possession of child pornography charge, five years on both the unauthorized access to a computer and the threats to the Vice President charges, and a mandatory two-year minimum prison sentence on each count of aggravated identity theft.
Ardolf, they told police, had picked up their 4-year-old son and kissed him.
So let me see if I get this straight. The max penalty for child porn possession is 10 years, and picking up a 4 year old and kissing him (presumably without the parent's consent) isn't even in the charges? Given that child porn has been extended to include images of adults who are portrayed as children and that he had inappropriate contact with a real child, that seems out of whack to me. Distribution of child porn is easier for me to understand being in the same ball park as inappropriate contact, but possession? And not even including inappropriate contact in the charges?
Maybe there is a good reason in this specific case that the articles don't cover, but this seems like a solid red flag to analyze the laws and make sure they are coded properly. This sounds like a pretty serious bug to me.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The one linked to at the end of the article http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU Is much better then the one linked to here.
Addendum: How much legal headache did his neighbor go through before Ardolf was suspected? The article doesn't say
There is a better article here that has a few more details:
http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU
He did apparently get a visit from the secret service regarding the death threats.
I dont read
Unless you have the foresight to use a spoofer or - even better - use a throw-away USB wi-fi dongle, your MAC address will show up in the router's DHCP client log until the lease expires. Boom, headshot.
Four potential trails?
Please share. :)
I couldn't agree more. There are so many examples of how the system is broken, how the government, whose stated job is to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", has remorselessly abandoned the people it was elected to govern.
I can't believe there isn't more uproar about this, and yet I know why there isn't, at least for me: I feel completely powerless to affect any change (which is they way he wants it).
But as bad as this is, I don't know that there's anything inherently better. From a programming perspective, we need to make a system that fails gracefully, that defaults to protecting the user.
kicked in and he [sunglasses]...just couldn't hack it.
>> Likely all his computer equipment confiscated for evidence
>> Until all the paper work is done, the 'I's dotted and the
>> 'T's crossed, he will be without his computer gear,
>> since it would be evidence in the case still.
His hardware could be in the hands of the local Gestapo for a lot longer time. That is what happened to a brand new high end PC that I let my girlfriend borrowed so she could edit a batch of videos for her website.
She was at home doing exactly that when two uniforms and a probation officer just walked into her living room. Seems her new housemate neglected to tell her he was felon on parole. She tells the officers the parolee is not there., so the cops start looking around to see if he is hiding somewhere.
When they don't find him, they start searching for contraband. They start with the parole's bedroom but they don't stop there. They pull every drawer out and dunp the contents in a big pile on the floor. After they finish trashing my girlfriends entire apt, the cops act pissed off because they didn't find anything. Of course they don't wanna go back to the cop shop empty handed.
Without even warning her, they just unplug the PC, and take it with them. while ignoring my girlfriend who tells them that the computer is not the property of the damn parolee. There were TV's, VCR's and her stereo sitting next to the computer. Why didn't these junior storm troopers show any interest in that hardware.
Did they take it because of the content my girlfriend was editing when they arrived? Their was nothing illeagal on that new computer but they sure wanted to take the PC back to their office. Did they wanna show their fellow officers the video clips of this beautiful naked redhead.
There was no warrant allowing them to seize my property and they ignored the DOJ rules that require computers be treated like a printing press because of the Bill of Rights
And now that beautiful redhead is now really pissed off. She calls me after she spoke with her lawyer. He told her to get the store receipts for the PC and a letter sighed by me. then goes downtown with the paperwork to prove ownership but the cops refuse to release the PC claiming it was evidence needed for the parole hearing.
A couple of weeks go by, at the parole hearing is over her housemate is sent back to prison so there no reason to keep the PC. The police just give her the runaround and won't even tell her why they won't release my damn PC. She tries several more times and finally a detective tells her that the PC is being held pending "forensic examination".
Tired of this bullshit My girlfriend and her lawyer go down to the courthouse, file a motion to fore the county release the fuckin computer. Eventually a judge issues a court order telling the cops they must release my computer. When my girlfriend takes the order signed by the judge to get the computer, the cops claim that they can't find the damn thing.
WTF is going on here? I tell my girlfriend to forget the computer, its not worth spending more money to sue the county for a few thousand bucks. Several months later, a letter from the county comes threatening to sell my god damn computer!! My girlfriend goes to the county auction facility and finally she comes back with that damn computer.
What had once been a new high end computer with only a few hours on it won't even boot now, Those lousy thieves replaced my 10,000 RPM hard drive with the fast and wide SCSI interface with some dinky el cheapo hard drive and then didn't even bother to installing Windows on it. the Matrox video capture card I paid a lot of money for is also gone along with all the extra RAM I had bought.
Those stupid fuckers acted like more like bunch of gangsters wearing badges instead of cops. The police ignored the our rights, violated federal law and the special DOJ rules related to computer seizures. Maybe the mishandling of my computer, refusing to return the machine and then "loosing" the PC, w
Well, one of them surely would be that if they get the appropriate equipment and then wait until you connect they can triangulate on your signal and find your physical location.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
That is certainly a possibility.
Thank you for pointing it out. :)
The victim of this was damn lucky. Most people that got framed by this would be farting mayonnaise and ketchup in a max security Federal prison.
Man, you know way too much about prison lube. And now I do too!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
You miss the point. A "hacker" may have written the software he used, but that doesn't make him a "hacker." It makes him a (mis)user of tools produced by his betters, like most common criminals. The distinction is important because it criminalizes by inference an otherwise lawful pastime. "Close enough", as they say, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades :-).
I just got forwarded this link by an associate of mine. I was surprised to find out this made slashdot... I was the "private investigator" that was hired to originally absolve the neighbor from sending the original emails which included the child porn to the lawfirm's partners. After seeing the pattern I thought I had a good chance to catch the hacker and the firm retained my services to go after him. The reasoning was that if we were to lock things down (remove the wireless and hardwire) that the person trying to get at the neighbor would find other avenues to get at him. We had a very reasonable honey pot that could produce honey sitting in front of us. I'm independent not working for any one other than my own company/myself or subcontracted for numerous firms around. I used a combination of wireshark and a few self custom written utilities to go after this guy. And no, these utilities are mine and are not for sale; sorry. I'm an engineer/analyst, security specialist, and developer with about 24 years of paid professional experience which really helps when you need to understand something then write a utility to provide it. His wireless was installed by qwest and used WEP as the base configuration (GASP). Whether or not this encryption should have been used or not, the sheer nature that there was some form of encryption did matter in the end. It is easy to hack WEP (and not too hard for WPA/WPA2 either...) but it is illegal to do so. This is one of the six charges he was charged with. From what I understand, if there was no encryption then it would have been a completely different case... It took months of watching the traffic, sifting through gigabytes of PCAP logs, to find what I was looking for. Once I found the smoking gun it was provided back to the FBI that validated what I found then issued a search warrant to go after the guy. The fact was that a MAC address was impossible to use so the firewall log only showed that rogue connections were being made. A single IP address was also impossible to use since that IP address was being assigned by the neighbor's DHCP server (dsl router). The FBI and Secret Service was not involved with the initial technical search nor could they be due to federal laws. Barry was a "certified ethical hacker" (CEH) which means that he knew the process and has been trained to run the proper utilities to hack. Not that this is mandatory, any kiddie can search on youtube to find out how to do this and just how easy it is. But he at least understood the concept of IP addressing. It turns out that he understood MAC addresses as well since he was changing his computer's NIC's MAC address on a regular basis. I don't know exactly what was found on Barry's computers once the FBI took over or how much (if any) additional child porn was pulled. I do know he found the previous neighbors (from another city) SSNs, their tax returns, and also copies of the current threatening letters on his computers. The other neighbor's around Barry's house were also broken into which made the argument of using a YAGI antennae an almost impossible feat due to the physical locations of the houses. All I know is that this guy had some serious issues and became "bitter" at the world that seemed to have started when his wife suddenly died about 10 years ago. There was a LOT to this case and it wasn't a simple slam dunk. We had a mountain of evidence that was racked up over a period of time. Each piece was necessary to prove/disprove methods and ownership. The worst part was getting the information in a form that the jury would understand. I firmly believe that our federal prosecutor had a good understanding (and took the time to understand) the technology behind it and created a very easily understood case without losing the intrigrity of the technology. Point is, no matter how good you think you are; there is always someone better (and the same goes for me as well). Stay white; its just not worth it.... This guy is looking at a possible 44 years in fed. Barry was offered a plea of 2 y
The fact is if a item is secured and you gain access without permission, it is considered illegal. If you have a storage shed and take the cheap way out and use a $1.00 lock and someone cuts it off with a toe nail clipper is that breaking and entering or not considered because they didn't buy a $20 lock that was unbreakable? Can you honestly say that because a mechanism is easily circumvented that it's legal to do so? The point that Barry had to use a piece of software to circumvent the (weak) security on the wireless device is enough to consider it hacking. This would have been a completely different case if the wireless was open.
You might want to look up the official definition of "hacker"... www.webster.com
Hard to know for sure... But regardless you cannot threaten a public official (or any citizen for that matter), but the public official will be taken a lot more seriously. You are right, the cops appear to be trained to run prebuild applications and dont understand technology. After all, most of the cops probably had little to nothing to do with technology before they went into their profession. Unforunately for Barry, we were involved long before that...