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RCMP Arrest Canadian Teen For Heartbleed Exploit
According to PC Mag, a "19-year-old Canadian was
arrested on Tuesday for his alleged role in the breach of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) website, the first known arrest for exploiting the Heartbleed bug. Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes (pictured) of London, Ontario faces one count of Unauthorized Use of Computer and one count of Mischief in Relation to Data." That exploit led to a deadline extension for some Canadian taxpayers in getting in their returns this year. The Register has the story as well. The Montreal Gazette has some pointed questions about how much the Canadian tax authorities knew about the breach, and when.
I for one welcome arresting people who seem to think it is a good idea to enter someones home just because they didn't get to update all their locks on their home.
Sure it is easy to update your PC, but if you have a mission critical application running, you need to make sure you take all the right steps even with the security vulnerability to make sure it doesn't go down.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
LOL. Let's report on real countries, eh, and not just on one of USSA's puppet states.
So you do something stupid like that in the US or Canada or England or any other civilized area and you get caught in like a day. Do it in Russia or Indonesia or Turkey or Israel (mega malware hotbeds) and you might get caught somewhere between 2 years and never. Where is the UN on this one? OHHHHH THAT'S RIGHT it's all old people who don't know a thing about technology. That explains the problem.
I imagine this kid will get what he deserves, but what about the CRA? They should've immediately taken their servers offline until they were patched. Will anyone get any heat for that?
I'd care about his age if he were 10-14 years old or about that, who didn't hack at that age?
When you're legal age you know what you're doing.
Ah the brilliance of youth -
"I have a script for an exploit"
"I can try it against the tax man"
"I won't get caught"
"I'm not going to use the results so no-bad"
"Hey what's with the cuffs!"
Damn that was a quick arrest. His basement must have not very deep. Something tells me he was not realizing the extent of his actions because: -picked the worst entity to try the exploit on -picked an entity in his home country -7 proxies and all -prison.
On it being 'revealed' he suffers from Ass Burgers?
Here in USA it's being reported this way:
"Heartbleed hacker caught in Canada"
Translation:
Media sheep, go back to sleep. We caught THE hacker responsible for Heartbleed, thus it can fall into the memory hole. Any concerns you may have about your fellow citizens, their business interests or governments monitoring you, or perhaps about the general competence of software development (!!!) can also go back to sleep.
Sleep, sleep my lovelies. Tomorrow there is obedience at school/job, and then shopping and sexy videos on the internet. Sleep, sleep.
Futurist Traditionalism
I like the name of the "Mischief in Relation to Data" charge. It sounds vague enough it could mean just about anything.
Heck, this might even be on my resume, I'll have to check.
>> The Register has the story as well
Duh - the Register is where most of us read the story so we'll know what to write when the same news appears on SlashDot tomorrow.
I never wanted to do this in the first place!
I... I wanted to be... A LUMBERJACK!
I am withholding judgment until actual facts are known.
Would not at all be surprised if CRA was previously owned then used "heartbleed" and this kid (who I suspect actually did run a heartbleed probe of some kind) as cover or the most convenient explanation out of incompetence.
Don't see how anyone can anyone trust them after BS PR statement they posted to their site when they would have known at that time they were compromised.
I've talked to an accountant about this and we're both convinced this was an RCMP sting. They announced there was a vulnerability on their website about six hours before they patched it. That's either totally stupid and insane, or it was a police sting and they were just waiting to see who would be stupid enough to try and break in through the open door. Please have a seat.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Other than the fact that they misidentify an exploit as a virus, you're telling me that Fox News has a better headline?
Fox News, that I'm told like the Daily Mail in UK is nothing but a tabloid that no one serious reads? And that's supposed to be completely unrelated to it being one of only a few media sources that are right-wing?
Do tell.
Futurist Traditionalism
This is more like making a copy of the old credit card carbon copy slips; it doesn't appear to have any effect on the credit card itself, however it can be used for fraudulent purposes. In Canada, the SIN (Social Insurance NUMBER), is used by CRA, banks and potential employers, which means that being able to associate name, address, and SIN renders the information ineffective as a private/unique identifier.
NSA isn't spying on Americans. You disagree? You're overly paranoid.
That's a common tactic used by Communists and other totalitarians to silence dissent.
Oh wait, I see:
That's from your journal where you as an apologist for censorship endorse the idea of firing people for having "offensive" opinions.
I think you have mental health problems in addition to a serious lack of moral fortitude.
Futurist Traditionalism
Meanwhile, government agencies use the same exploit without any fear of retaliation (even buys them with your money)
http://www.wsws.org/en/article...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
IE, a polling organization conducts a poll for a vendor with a cost of one million dollars to the vendor to see which is the preferred widget, X or Y. Then, some third party comes along and points out a flaw in their testing methodology, thus invalidating all of the collected data.
That third party has "rendered that data meaningless, useless, or ineffective" and thus could be found guilty under this statute as worded.
This is just off the top of my head with 5 seconds thinking on it, I am sure many many such scenarios could be created. Data is not the same as physical property, you can't just take a property law and replace the word "property" with "data" and expect it to make sense (see the original "mischief" section above in the law).
Whoever got this on the books should be drawn and quartered.
(n/t)
He attacked early. Did he wrote the attack tool himself? Or did he received it from someone else?
According to the statement on the CRA web site, it was security agencies that told the CRA that 900 SINs were stolen:
So, are the security agencies monitoring traffic to government web sites, so that they are so specific? What else are they monitoring?
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