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Japanese Police Offers First-Ever Reward For Wanted Hacker
alphadogg writes "Japanese police are looking for an individual who can code in C#, uses a 'Syberian Post Office' to make anonymous posts online, and knows how to surf the web without leaving any digital tracks — and they're willing to pay. It is the first time that Japan's National Police Agency has offered a monetary reward for a wanted hacker, or put so much technical detail into one of its wanted postings. The NPA will pay up to $36,000, the maximum allowed under its reward system. The case is an embarrassing one for the police, in which earlier this year 4 individuals were wrongly arrested after their PCs were hacked and used to post messages on public bulletin boards. The messages included warnings of plans for mass killings at an elementary school posted to a city website."
I think hackers have more to fear from the mafia underground than legal authorities. If you get caught by the federalies, they'll put you in prison for a few years, and you can rethink your criminal ways. However... if you start looking for profit with your data breeches, and you start looking into money mule networks then the mafia and seedy underground isn't very far away. What if that breech at the door isn't the feds, but some mafiaa goons who tell you to keep doing what you're doing, but they'll protect you for the cool price of all your profits. People who look to get into a life of crime may find it.
It is only a matter of time before a crime syndicate forms over all these careless hackers. They could recruit spammers, and hackers could be used to find more hackers...
God spoke to me
Nah, the Laughing Man was somewhat ethical. This sounds like one of his impersonators, which points to the Japanese government itself. So why would they post a reward for themselves? Wouldn't they want to make it as low profile as possible? Perhaps there is a rogue police agency in play here.
Classic framing/griefing. Obviously they should add "and they probably know all 4 of those people" to the evidence list. I guess they overlooked that little tidbit. Otherwise good luck tracking down proxies and Tor exit nodes cuz that info is as worthless as it gets when it comes to finding this person.
If you can read Japanese the definition is in this page.
Basically there is an anonymous board in Japan known as 2ch, which is the "father" of 2chan.net and "grandfather" of 4chan and all other *chan websites. Sometimes your IP is blocked for some reason and you can't post. So you used this Siberian Post Office as some sort of proxy and it posts for you.
Can someone kindly place a link that explain "Syberian Post Office"?
Thank you !
2ch sometimes bans IPs from posting. But not all boards on 2ch will share this ban. The "siberian super flash news" () board is one of these that doesn't take into account bans on the system, and so people post on this board and ask others to spread what they posted onto wherever they actually want it to be.
An extremely simple proxy for posting on 2ch, if you will.
That's what I'm reading. Someone coded up a redirector in C#. I'm...I'm not even sure that's a crime here. I mean, it's using someone's resources without their knowledge, but either the English-translation is missing some key info, or Japan has a zero-tolerance policy for, what might considered in other parts of the world, an almost minor transgression.
So, this person setup a redirector, and the Japanese are offering their highest reward for them. Yeah, we're missing something. I mean, the reward is only $36,000, which is, in the grand scheme of things, not much, but, apparently, it is the highest reward they can offer legally. I'm going to assume that they don't do that every day.
As for the C# language thing...I knew there was something we were missing. I am so used to hearing about C++ / VB.NET viruses that...have we ever had a C# virus before? You get so used to hearing the rain fall, sometimes you do not notice it has stopped, until it starts up again.
I am John Hurt.
I'm guessing its a proxy?
Close. After the Russian Revolution, when Stalin began stuffing Siberia with political dissidants, he realized how late the mail was arriving from those territories, making compliance to Party orders lag. Stalin decreed that the mail will be on time, and a clever Siberian post master adjusted the time stamp at his remote post. The mail from Siberia began to arrive in Moscow in record time, so it seemed. Subsequently, there was a Korean manufacturer that produced a router that, in an effort to speed up packet delivery, actually did time calculations on each packet to reduce apparent delivery time. The company went under, but sold about 200 of these routers, deployed mostly in the southern provinces of Japan. The routers caused all kinds of havoc as emails were time stamped before they arrived and even before they were composed. The routers were all replaced and surplused by 2004, and by now are extremely rare pieces of technology. Sometimes evidence of one of these routers show up in logs at hacking competitions, though they are expressly forbidden. Eventually, network administrators, a poetic bunch, upon finding anamolous log entries, began referring to the individual mystery routers as a "Syberian Post Office."