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Krebs Hacker Unmasked, Hit Ars and Wired's Honan
altjira writes "Brian Krebs, hot on the tail of the hacker who DDOS his site and SWATted his home, followed up on a tip, found the dox, called and then outed his hacker. Turns out it may have been the same guy who hit Wired's Mat Honan and Ars Technica."
The attacker is ... a 20 year old guy who apparently has too much time on his hands, and was surprisingly careless with his personal information for someone exploiting the personal information of others.
Most crimes are solved because the criminal is careless or stupid or both.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Given the propensity of the American police responding to that sort of call to shoot first and possibly get round to asking questions a bit later on, SWATting somebody should be charged as attempted murder
No, the policemen doing the shooting before asking questions should be charged with attempted murder.
In the same way that, if I told a bully someone insulted him behind his back, and he went and punched that guy, the bully would be charged.
This story is still in progress, but it's clear that this "Phobia" punk is intelligent enough in ways that really don't matter much and too stupid in ways that actually do matter. His father should have figured out what the son was doing a while ago, as his son is in the crime scene, stealing or helping to steal and use credit cards, SSNs, etc., breaking into private people's accounts and messing with them, paying for DDOS attacks against websites and sending SWAT teams to people's homes, so that somebody could actually get shot. This is all a punk move, what this idiot needs is about 3 years of labour camp, so that he'd at least repay some of the damage and 10 minutes of flogging on monthly basis, so that what could not be peacefully inserted into his brain would be painfully inserted into his back.
You can't handle the truth.
If your intend was to get the other person punched then you should be charged AS WELL. One does not exclude the other.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
More likely the DOJ will have him in Federal PoundYourAss Prison for 30 years.
The dumbest thing was to talk but also to involve cops with the SWAT thing. If he just kept to online stealing and harassment this wouldn't be as bad as the SWAT thing, now the cops have a personal issue as well with him. The way he just blurted everything out showed how really 'smart' he is.
You can't handle the truth.
While I agree it should be a crime of some sort, the person pulling the trigger should be the one charged with murder.
You're right. If, say, the person being SWAT'ed pulls a gun in self defense, because all he knows is his house is being invaded, and a police officer sees it and fires, as they are trained to do when seeing a lethal threat, that is TOTALLY murder.
More accurately, I think SWATing somebody should be negligent homicide if somebody dies, reckless endangerment if (as usually happens) nobody is hurt.
Given the propensity of the American police responding to that sort of call to shoot first and possibly get round to asking questions a bit later on, SWATting somebody should be charged as attempted murder
While I understand your sentiment, I have to disagree with you. In cases like "SWATting" these officers have been called to a scene where the assumption is that there is an armed person who has already killed a loved on and is emotionally distraught. As most law enforcement officers will tell you, domestic disturbances are some of the most unpredictable calls to go to. So a call like this would be about as scary as most police will ever get.
Granted, there are some pretty bad police officers out there. But there are a lot more really good ones. It's just that nobody seems to pay attention to them, except on rare occasions. Go check to see how much they get paid. It's pretty poorly in most cases. The average patrolman's salary is just over $50K An entry level application engineer makes a little over $54K. Barring natural disasters, a bad day at work for someone in IT is to have to work late. How much fun do you think it is to investigate a murder scene? Or a fatal car crash with children involved? For a patrolman a bad day could include coming home in a bag. In most professions a mistake will cost the company money. For an officer it could be someones life, or their own.
How would you handle call like this? Would you allow yourself to get shot prior to opening fire? Have you ever been shot at? Judging a situation after the fact from your nice comfy chair is just a little bit different than being an active participant.
It's funny that we will spend money to go see a movie and cheer on the cop who shoots the bad guy. But in 99.9% of the times you see this in movies, the "good guy" would be criminally charged for acting the way they do. But when a cop shoots someone who feigns having a gun and does not respond to commands to submit we through a fit. The asshole that called this in is the one at fault here for abusing the system that is in place to protect us.
I doubt this was the first thing he did wrong. I bet it escalated from somewhere.
In order to keep him from getting to this point, you employ the same simple rules of parenting employed on everyone else who isn't a constant fuck-up:
1. Scold him harshly.
2. If that doesn't work, or if the infraction is grave enough, beat the shit out of him.
3. Repeat as needed.
Worked for me. I had wooden spoons snapped over my ass and got to taste the belt buckle once or twice. There's a reason why the old-school punishments lasted so long.
Sigh... becoming a police officer is a CHOICE. Investigating murder scenes, cleaning up car crashes, and keeping angry wives and husbands from killing each other is part of the job. The people who become police officers CHOOSE to deal with these and other stressful situations, they CHOOSE to (occasionally) risk their lives. CHOOSING to put yourself in the line of fire is no excuse to trample on the rights of the people you're supposed to protect. If they want a bigger paycheck with safer working conditions, they can find different jobs.
I've seen this attitude plenty of times, where people seem to want to excuse the terrible behavior and the military-style tactics of police because "the poor dears have a tough job without much pay, cut them some slack." Well, NO! As people to whom the rest of us have given the right to use lethal force and invade and seize private property, the police should be held to a much higher standard, and they should be trained to understand that they work for us, not the other way around.
The bad apples in the police forces may very well be in the minority, I don't know. I've known cops who are friendly and cops who are psychopaths or arrogant jerks. For example, I knew a guy who worked as a juvenile prison guard (while studying to become a full-fledged cop) and bragged about "putting the smackdown" on teenagers who ran their mouths.