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Man Convicted For Helping Thousands Steal Internet Access

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-web dept.

angry tapir writes "An Oregon man has been convicted of seven courts of wire fraud for helping thousands of people steal Internet service. Ryan Harris, 26, of Redmond, Oregon, was convicted by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He faces a prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the seven counts."

4 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Bad design by xenobyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If this guy could build a business, complete with websites, forums and so on, it must have gone on for quite a while (6 years it turns out), so it is obvious that:

    1) The ISP didn't know enough about their business to realize the giant holes this guy was exploiting.
    2) The ISP was incompetent enough to let this guy and his customers steal service (which the ISP's other customers paid for) for a long time.

    Any sentencing here should include a heavy fine to the ISP for technical incompetence.

    --
    "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
    1. Re:Bad design by Asic+Eng · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, from the description it appears the guy was selling modified cable modems to sniff data on the coax line and enabling the user to change MAC addresses etc. This would seem to indicate that the device would operate with several configuration sets - maybe switching those on the fly depending whether they were already in use. This way the users' modems would be able to replicate the access data of other users.

      That could be prevented by using encryption for exchanging login data, but it's pretty hard to detect: You can't easily tell the difference between unauthorized access of user B with user A's login data, and user A who just happens to use the internet a lot. Also you wouldn't notice a few users doing that in one particular segment, the guys customers could be distributed all over the US:

  2. Writing tools to configure cable modems by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Writing tools to configure cable modems is what he got convicted for. He just wrote some tools so you could BOOTP your cable modem with a "valid" MAC and uncapped access speed. The cable companies knew they were putting the security in the dynamically configured end user device. They didn't fix the security flaw after it was publicly known. All the guy did was write an exploit for a publicly known bug, others (end users) were the ones that abused it.

    Oh well, at least now there is jurisprudence to put gun manufacturers into jail. After all, they make the tools that others use to commit crimes, which is what this guy is going to do hard time for.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
  3. Re:And what about the people on the end? by Xacid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Conversely, the fella I worked with was very practical about the topic. Basically I can afford up to X but I'd be eating only ramen and wiping with newspaper. For every increment lower that I could get to would increase my quality of life so either make more money or find something significantly cheaper than X. And hell, I was 23 at the time.

    Oh, and the bank - Bank of America oddly enough. Incidentally that guy doesn't work there anymore. He moved back to Sweden. Probably saw the writing on the wall, heh.