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Irked By Cyberspying, Georgia Outs Russia-based Hacker
coondoggie writes "In one of the photos, the dark-haired, bearded hacker is peering into his computer's screen, perhaps puzzled at what's happening. Minutes later, he cuts his computer's connection, realizing he has been discovered. In an unprecedented move, the country of Georgia — irritated by persistent cyber-spying attacks — has published two photos of a Russia-based hacker who, the Georgians allege, waged a persistent, months-long campaign that stole confidential information from Georgian government ministries, parliament, banks and NGOs."
Can somebody help me out here? Since the title of this submission has "hacker" in it, I thought it'd be about some guy who does cool stuff with hardware, or somebody who has been writing some intense open source software. But I don't see any of that here. Is this submission actually discussing a "cracker", rather than a "hacker"?
This looks like another Adobe exploit. Both the bad guy and the good guys used it. And when they infected Boris Badenoff's computer, they only took .doc's and not .pdf's. I wish I could be so selective.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
"Bearded man found shot dead in Russian apartment, found hunched over keyboard."
The Georgians don't mess around, any more than the Russkies do.
He'd better watch his back.
".
This guy looks Georgian to me. He could be a human rights activist who is now accused to be a spy. Politics are dirty and the truth is far from what the officials say in that part of the world.
~ Best man at your service.
Public Service Announcement:
Don't hack with a web cam plugged in.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Except it was the other way around - russkies wanted their colonies back. And speaking of escaping the gravity well, Estonia seems to be in the clear. Good on them!
I love the carpet on his ceiling. Not sure how easy it is to vacuum though. Also, have I seen that guy in a movie somewhere?
...Computer Hacks You! Seriously loving the decor though.
Story says hacker knew he was hacked after 10 minutes. How does that explain two pictures different angles one shirt less.
It's a well-known and interesting fact that hackers can move their laptops and put on a shirt in less than five minutes.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
My worry is what did the web cam capture between shots when he stood to get a shirt.
How is that not the first thing removed if it isn't built-in or covered up with a piece of duct tape if it is? High skilled dumbass apparently.
Don't hack the country you're in. Russia has a history of excusing hackers who steal from other countries. You almost get congratulated if you steal and bring more money into the local economy. Even if they're upset, a lot of countries don't like to extradite.
Anonymous americans will swallow anything and then regurgitate it as fact. Georgia attacked the Russkies at the border, the Russkies chased them all the way back to the capital. If they "wanted their colonies back" they could easily have stomped the capital there and then and made the case that it was for their own defence. But that's not what happened, having marched to the city limits of the capital they had proved their point to the world and reiterated that point by simply walking away.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Does using a trojan count as hacking? I can't keep up with things these days.
Still the part where the 'hacker' downloads an executable file, and runs it...that's weak sauce. One, it tells us he's probably running Windows. Two, it shows he is an idiot: what 'hacker' blindly runs an executable file, even one given to him by 'friends'?
See, if the 'authorities' had managed to capture an image of him by pulling apart a botnet client, tracing the originating command server through several wayward paths, spelunking their way up the internet one router at a time until they found the source of the packets containing a fraudulant origin IP address, then exploited a weakness on a service running on a common port that wasn't patched / no one knew about, then turned on his webcam to grab a photo or two of him while quietly copying evidence off his machine, I'd be inclined to say "GG" and award some finger-snaps for one-upping someone on their own battlefield.
But using social engineering on someone running a common operating system, someone without the common sense inherent in a level one helldesk operator (do not run unknown executables)...I mean, he doesn't even fire up a VM and lock it off the internet before running the thing? Does anyone actually think this guy was anything more than, at best, a script kiddy, and at worst, a pawn?
If this is the best news that they can put out these days regarding their capture of 'cyber-criminals,' there either aren't any, or they're getting schooled.
Here's a hint for understanding power in the virtual realm -> if you need to work with others to achieve something, or need to get a judge to sign off on something, you're doing it wrong. If you need to call up a Bell to run a data tap to find the equivalent of the opportunistic thief robbing a 7-11...then you don't know enough about technology to 'fight' effectively.
I am John Hurt.
I would think that at some point we are going to see intelligence agencies start to send hit teams to kill hackers. It has probably already happened but we haven't seen headlines for it.
Russia shot down a Georgian drone.
Georgia shelled the Russian peacekeeper force barracks, killing several dozen people. And that was a detour - primarily, they were indiscriminately shelling residential blocks of Tskhinval.
Those are totally two comparable "provocations".
One: what difference does it make if he runs Windows or not? Would he be more eligible to be a hacker if he was running AmigaOS or BeOS or what are you trying to say?
Two: The article did not say anything about running a executable file. It said he had downloaded a zip file called ""Georgian-Nato Agreement.", not that the zip contained exe's. There are other files than just executables that can contain malicious code, for example the guy himself is supposed to have used XDP files.
"Tskhinval or Ch'reba; Russian: ()), is the capital of South Ossetia, a disputed region which has been recognised as an independent Republic by Russia and another four UN members, and is regarded by Georgia and all other UN member states de jure as a region within Georgian sovereign territory."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tskhinvali
Perhaps you should shell a barracks when a foreign power builds one in one of your cities. At least according to the 189 of the 193 members of the UN who agree that Ossetia is part of Georgia. I'm pretty sure if Mexico built a barracks in San Antonio Texas, if they didn't leave, we'd shell it too.