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The Wi-Fi Hacking Neighbor From Hell
Hugh Pickens writes "Barry Ardolf, a Minnesota hacker prosecutors described as a 'depraved criminal,' has been handed an 18-year prison term for unleashing a vendetta of cyberterror that turned his neighbors' lives into a living nightmare. Ardolf hacked into his next-door neighbors' Wi-Fi network and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct, and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden. The bizarre tale began in 2009 when Matt and Bethany Kostolnik moved into the house next door to Ardolf. On their first day at their new home, the Kostolnik's then-4-year-old son wandered near Ardolf's house. While carrying him back next door, Ardolf allegedly kissed the boy on the lips. 'We've just moved next door to a pedophile,' Mrs. Kostolnik told her husband. The couple reported Ardolf to the police, angering their creepy new neighbor (PDF). 'I decided to "get even" by launching computer attacks against him,' said Ardolf, who downloaded Wi-Fi hacking software and spent two weeks cracking the Kostolnik's WEP encryption. Then he used their own Wi-Fi network to create a fake MySpace page for the husband, where he posted a picture of a pubescent girl having sex with two young boys. Ardolf turned down a 2-year plea agreement last year to charges related to the Biden e-mail. After that, the authorities piled on more charges, including identity theft and two kiddie-porn accusations carrying lifetime sex-offender registration requirements."
Noob! :)
What additional security measures can be taken to thwart script kiddies like this guy? Is MAC address filtering + WEP/WPA encryption (or one of those) sufficient security. At this point I want to shut the fucking WiFi off, but there are others in the household who wouldn't go for that.
turned into byzantine obsession is a sign of a person who will do nothing but bring grief to anyone who ever touches his or her life
if you ever meet this type, back off slowly smiling, then run like hell
their feeling of disempowerment and helplessness (self-learned) and the eternal fight against that (fruitlessly projected outwards) is all they know, it defines their entire existence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From the summary:
'I decided to "get even" by launching computer attacks against him,' said Ardolf
Sounds like he confessed, so, um, yeah?
We're all full up on Crazy here...
The guy didn't download the CP for sexual purposes. He's not a paedophile, just a warped anti-social individual.
That register is for people who have a proven (and acted upon) attraction to minors; Those who are a danger to children. Adding him to the list dilutes it and mitigates its usefulness. What he did should be covered by libel / defamation laws. He deserves to be taken out of society for what he did to that family, but there's nothing in there which supports the idea that he's dangerous sexual offender.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This seems totally bogus to me. How could someone possibly crack WEP in two weeks? I suppose if you didn't read the instructions you might be able to stretch it to a few hours, but two weeks? What was he doing all that time?
I shut it off anyway. If you don't have a wire, you don't connect to my network.
Most NICs support either intentional or "back-door" MAC address cloning. Cloud-computing resources can crack your WEP (trivial), WPA (harder/slower), and WPA2 (much harder and slower, but still doable, unless you rotate them daily).
Then, if you have implemented some reasonable level of security, when the jackboots kick in your door, you'll have a much harder time defending yourself during the pre-trial investigation, and, then, assuming you live long enough, in court, due to the security you put into place, obviously trying to hide your evil actions.
At best, you can discourage casual (mis-)use of your WiFi, but that wouldn't help against a long-term attack like this one.
If you're worried about it, shut it off, and run the cable, as I have.
Is that prosecutors are allowed to offer plea deals.
If the prosecutor believes crimes were committed, then file charges. If not, don't.
If people are cowed into pleaing guilty (or no contest) to charges to which they believe they're innocent due to legal costs or fears of false conviction, the solution is radical reform of the legal system. NOT to create a gray area of semi-crime, semi-guilt, and semi-punishement. That is *not* innocence until proven guilty.
Assuming there is NO DOUBT at all, like the accused actually performed the act in the courtroom.
I'm against the death penalty, only because I see how the rest of government performs and can't believe the judicial system is any better.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Yeah, Mac filtering is pretty useless. I mean, what's the chances of a leet hacker using a Mac?
Steven Seagal's Apple Newton notwithstanding.
He basically screwed around with the whole court system. Making a withdrawing pleas, coaching his family on what to say and notes they should write to the judge, making outrageous counter-claims, etc. Once he abandoned the plea they went after him for everything he had done. The 18 years is fair based on everything I read in that PDF.
You mean besides the confession (already mentioned by another reply to you), and besides the fact that when he was emailing his victim's coworkers and bosses with message claiming to be a pedophile he accidentally left some of his ISP's software running, so his laptop was sending login information to Comcast using his own name and Comcast account number? Besides the search warrant that turned up a journal where he detailed his plan to "utterly destroy his life"? Besides the manuals on hacking WEP where he had scribbled his victim's wifi network name? Besides the fact that on his computer was the child pornography he planted on his victim? Along with a note in his journal "PLANT CHILD PORN". Besides the pile of stolen mail under his bed? Besides the unsent letter he had prepared where he had printed off his victim's last tax return, and attached a note that their life belongs to him, and he will end it? Yeah, basically sounds like a setup, could have been anybody!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I have to disagree. Generally speaking, the source/cause of paedophilia is mental and/or emotional immaturity. There are other causes, of course, but "loving children" as it were is a rather misunderstood problem often accompanied by the very same witch hunt mentality you exhibit.
And the problems we see these days are only made worse by current marketing and advertising trends, increased paranoia and a general failure to address causes and sources.
Death is not a punishment. It is a remedy for society. Death should only be used when a person is otherwise incurable.
As a society, we should have learned a tremendous lesson about the terror society places in people with "differences." People of different religions, sexual orientation and even political ideology have all been openly persecuted in this country [the US] until the tragedies were exposed and it became wrong instead of popular to do so. I speak of persecution of muslims and other non-christians, homosexuals and communist party members.
It is when paedophiles have a fear if getting caught and persecuted that they are moved from touching children to killing them after being unable to control their impulses. I believe if these troubled individuals were allowed to deal with their problems in a way that does not immediately ruin their lives (which is not really an option which is presently available) we would see a great deal less of the tragedies we have seen over the years.
Hate, fear and mistrust all come quite naturally to people and doesn't have to be taught or encouraged. And instead of teaching each other to grow past these animal fears, we justify and institutionalize them.
And it's not like we haven't seen the classic pattern of human behavior before. We see it all the time and in our history. When alcohol was criminalized, birth was given to massive organized crime and violence. And the "war on drugs" helps keep all sorts of organized crime and violence alive and well. Examples are too obvious and plenty, I think. And while this is a problem that can definitely affect the way in which a child's mind grows and develops, there is more to the problem than simply identifying and prosecuting the offenders.
True, but make them go through the effort.
It is one more step, which when revealed in court, will help hang them.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Don't trust your Wifi router to secure your internet connection, is the answer. WEP was built for wireless, and cracked. WPA was built for wireless, and cracked. Bluetooth was built for wireless, and cracked. It's only a matter of time before WPA2 and everything else goes the same way.
Plug a *real* router in there somewhere so that such things can be monitored and logged and/or you can VPN over your own internal Wifi link so that even someone having complete access to your wireless isn't a problem at all. Then you don't even *need* wifi encryption turned on at all (but it's a good hindrance to any intruders) and you can play games like upside-down-ternet with people who try to get a free ride on your connection.
That's the setup I had - just had a WPA network (WPA2 wasn't around at the time) and didn't trust WEP or (correctly, it seems now) WPA to secure my network. So I just made the wireless access point be an "untrusted" network, as it should be, on my main Linux router - which did the actual connection to the Internet and offering IP's etc.
Whenever I connected to wifi in the home, I ran OpenVPN over the top (so the only traffic you could sniff would be my already-encrypted OpenVPN traffic) - which was transparent and automatic and simple and could use per-client keys. I surfed, and my guests minds were blown that even after I'd told them the WPA password and they'd joined the wireless network they couldn't "see" anything at all.
This also lets you block EVERYTHING coming in via wifi to your laptop except for that OpenVPN port with a decent software firewall, which means you don't have to worry about something accessing filesharing ports, or tapping into whatever junk services your PC's are exposing to the whole wifi network (which, incidentally, can save a lot of bandwidth).
You're seriously relying on a piece of £30 Taiwanese crap to secure your entire Internet connection being broadcast over a radio sphere that could be kilometres wide if you have the right reception equipment? Nope. Treat it like an unsecured Internet connection - tunnel into a known-good server which has a wired connection to the Internet.
You read the article! No fair!
WEP / WPA? I wouldn't lump those two together. WEP is garbage. These people were running WEP. WEP should be unincluded for all modern routers (you should have to go out of your way to get a special purpose WEP router if you really need it). That's an ideal world. So, what can you do? Use WPA2-AES with a 40 character passphrase if you're paranoid. Problem solved (for all practical purposes).
The dude kissed a little boy who wandered over to his house while he was bringing said little boy home. Murder is not the appropriate response.
Why not use WPA2-AES, rather than WPA-TKIP/AES? The latter has only the minimum strength of WPA-TKIP (which isn't terribly strong).
No sense in exposing your network needlessly.
This man is truly a depraved and evil person. Not only did he try to frame his current neighbors, he harassed and stole from his previous neighbors. When the Feds attempted to go easy on him, he fired the lawyer that scored this sweetheart deal and withdrew his plea. He then proceeded to blatantly violate the terms of his release from prison. Well after the trial had begun, he pled guilty a second time. Because this wasn't nearly enough fun, he tried to withdraw his plea AGAIN (that failed.) He also added attempted witness tampering to his list of crimes, because apparently he wasn't going to be locked away for enough time yet. (But he did it via mail sent from prison! I guess he didn't get the memo that except for mail to your lawyer, all letters to/from prison can be read. Whoops!)
He shows absolutely no remorse for his actions; to this day thinking this "revenge" was justified. (He even tried to get the victim's testimony disqualified because they failed to obtain a construction permit for work done on their basement and therefore they could not be trusted. Talk about the (cast iron) pot calling the stainless-steel kettle black.)
Was he TRYING to dig his hole as deep as possible? About the only thing that could have made him worse off would have been a pro se defense, followed by trying to attack the judge during the trial.
Locking guys like this away is what we have a justice system for. Good riddance.
pedophiloe appears to be a red herring.
I am a parent. I also know a lot of other parents. It would not be unusual fro a 4 year old to random kiss someone who was carrying them, yes even on the lips.
Read the PDF: It happened when she wasn't looking. Why the hell would she suddenly turn around when a stranger was holding her child?
The child said it happened, but only after more then enough time for the memory to be implanted from hearing speculation from it's parents.
Saying this incidence is pedophile is like says a mother kissing her child is incest.
Of course, his response was so irrational that I think he probably should get a lot of therapy while in prison.
AS to you specific claim, I can't agree to it, it's too general. What about when 2 17 years olds are dating, and then one turns 18? IS the pedophile? and it's not unheard of for that to happen. Should that 18 year old be put to death? even if it's the girl?
Yes, we can sight examples where it's obviously wrong. But the edge cases are far to many to make a bold statemnt that they should all die.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds like Asperger's Syndrome gone bad. With AS a person can either recognize that their are massively unsuited to interacted with the human race, and seek to correct their own behaviour, or they can start seeing the human race as a threat and turn into a dangerous, paranoid loon.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Note that while I think that the court documents of the prosecution read like a really badly written TV soap, I am in no way supporting this "hacker" (not a term I would even think of attributing to him).
In the court document (second link in this post), there is crap like:
Details of the Offense
A. Ardolf Kisses the Kostolniks’ Four-Year-Old Son Shortly
after the Kostolniks Move to the Neighborhood
Matt and Bethany Kostolnik moved into their dream home in
August 2008. Located on a cul-de-sac in Blaine, the home provided
room for their growing family; they had two children under five
years old, and were expecting another child soon. On August 2,
2008, one day after moving into their new home, the dream became a
nightmare. The Kostolniks’ four-year-old son, W.K., wandered into
a neighbor’s yard to climb on an inviting play-set. A pregnant
Bethany saw W.K. in the neighbor’s yard and, while standing in the
driveway of her home, called for him to come back while
simultaneously trying to keep her 18-month-old son, J.K., from
walking out the open doorway of their home. Finally, Bethany
chased after W.K.
.
Its not a statement of facts, its a horror story told in the voice of Morgan Freeman at the beginning of a B movie.
Sham(e)
You are so wrong its not funny. People with aspergers do not need to correct their behavior and more or less than anyone else.
There have been lots of studies and there is no more of a risk of someone with aspergers becoming alienated and dangerous than anyone else with a socioeconomic or mental disability. Which happens to comprise a huge portion of the world.
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