Authorities Closing On LulzSec

mask.of.sanity writes "The noose is tightening on hacker group LulzSec, according to a coordinated group of like-minded users, some from LulzSec-Exposed that claim to have uncovered the identity of LulzSec members and supplied them to the FBI. An arrest Monday of a UK teenager was rumoured to be former hacker scene member Ryan Clearly, and the trackers, which includes a former FBI agent, say this arrest is the first of many. They refused to disclose the identities of LulzSec chief, saying it would cause the members to burn the evidence of attacks and scatter."

Comments

Huh?

[Afforess]

Really, the FBI isn't afraid that capturing one alleged member of LulzSec won't cause the other members to bolt and hide the evidence, but disclosing the names will?

It's days like these I think elementary logic classes should be manditory.

Very Unfortunate.

[crow_t_robot]

This is unfortunate considering what lulzsec is currently doing for the IT job market. These attacks are getting incompetent people fired and making companies go out and look for competent people to hire in their place. Also, it is forcing them to actually invest money in their IT infrastructure instead of just slapping some servers together and letting some clowns straight out of a degree mill run them. People need to realize that this is a net good thing because if a 19 year old with no formal education is ripping servers owned by multi-billion dollar international corporations then the Chinese have already been there. A company would not even know about the Chinese intrusion much less publicize it once they found out so what lulzsec is doing is shining the light on how poorly these companies that hold your data are run.

Re:Very Unfortunate.

[Dhalka226]

I understand what you're saying, and to some degree I agree: The state of security on Internet-facing web properties is staggeringly bad, and the fact that companies who do an incompetent job protecting their users are getting publicly called out is, in its own way, a good thing.

Still, there are right ways and wrong ways to do things and LulzSec is clearly on the wrong side of the line. This is particularly true when you read their own postings about how they do it "for the lulz." "You wouldn't know we hacked people if we weren't arrogant shitheads about it!" was nothing more than a post-event attempt at rationalization. And their nonsense with hacking into porn sites and trying to publicly shame people who visit them made me want to strangle them with my own hands.

Some good can come of all this, and I hope it does. But yes, I also hope these people are caught and punished. There are a lot of horrible things people can do to one another that might, in some way, lead to good conclusions, but that does not mean that they should be done. Robbing your neighbor to prod them into locking their doors at night may end up with a good outcome, but I should still go to prison for it. The same applies here.

Once they have done their time and paid their debts, I'm sure they can make quite a handy little salary doing these same damn things the right way.

Re:Very Unfortunate.

[woolpert]

This isn't the broken window fallacy. Nobody is trying to boost the economy by breaking perfectly good things.

Rubbish. The systems they are targeting are working fine. They are breaking perfectly working things, thus demonstrating that they are BREAKABLE. That's irrelevant. In the broken window fallacy the windows are breakable too.

Wrong.

If the systems they are targeting are breakable they are not working fine.

A window can be breakable and still perform its primary mission. The breakability of the window has nothing to do with the point of the story.

An authentication server can not be susceptible to such attacks while still be considered performing its primary mission.

Re:Logic disconnect...

[biodata]

if he's ever charged with anything

Re:Not the brightest

[Xest]

I'm suggesting that when you've been thinking about such things long enough there's very little room to make mistakes, and that if you have, you'll tend to know about it. The hacker mindset is one of meticulous attention to detail and obsessive thought about a subject on their mind, you can guarantee that particularly when paranoid about being caught which is going to be more the case with such announcements as this that the scope for mistakes will be so small, and the scope for mistakes that can't be cleaned up after the fact and before discovery is even smaller.

I'm not saying they couldn't be outsmarted by the feds, simply that they wont be outsmarted by someone foolish enough to post on the internet "We know the leader's identity", before he's actually been brought to justice. I also suspect that to actually catch them they're likely to somewhat cheat, and throw due process out the window- they may have a rough idea who is involved but not have the evidence to legitimately question them or seize their kit, so they'll make up some false charge to seize it and build up evidence upon that anyway. They may not even have a case then but the authorities including the judiciary seem quite competent at ruling against people even when the evidence is unacceptably weak in the first place.

They probably will get them some way or another, but it may not be through a legitimate thoroughly proper and clean legal process. Sure many such hackers have been caught in the end, but how many haven't over the years? How many spammers go untouched, how many criminal hackers do the authorities not even know the rought whereabouts of? how many DDOS attacks against major corporations even before anonymous started doing them went unpunished? you only have to look at the rather famous case of Al Capone, where physical evidence should theoretically have been much easier to come by and see that they had to do him on tax evasion in the end to see that sometimes, achieving proper justice against criminals can be quite the impossible task. The result then is either failure to deal with them at all, or a bending of the law.

I think more realistically you're underestimating the ability of smart criminals, particularly in the digital world to evade justice. For all the feel good stories about "criminal X has been caught" hammered into us on the news, and newspapers, there's plenty more who are not. It's perfectly possible they will fall into this category, and it seems blurting out to the world that you know the identities of these people even if you don't announce said identity is only going to make life that much harder for the authorities who may truly find any potential evidence has already been burnt and shredded already whether in the physical or digital sense. A smart investigation would simply not announce knowledge of the identity of the target until they were already in custody, anything else is just foolish penis waving.