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Two 19-Year-Olds Charged With Running Phone Harassment, Hack-For-Hire Sites (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the hang-up-and-try-again dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors have charged two 19-year-old men with running "hacking-for-hire" websites that attacked companies worldwide and did business with international hacking groups "Lizard Squad" and "PoodleCorp." Zachary Buchta of Fallston, Maryland, and Bradley Jan Willem van Rooy of the Netherlands, have both been charged with conspiring to cause damage to protected computers. Buchta walked out of federal court in Chicago yesterday after being released on bail. He was arrested earlier but released on his own recognizance. The judge ruled that Buchta can live with his mother in Maryland while he awaits trial, but he won't be allowed to access the Internet or have any contact with van Rooy. As for van Rooy, he was arrested in the Netherlands last month and remains in custody there. The allegations against Buchta and van Rooy are among the first US charges related to Lizard Squad. The site that first got the feds' attention was phonebomber.net, which allowed paying customers to purchase a barrage of harassing phone calls directed at chosen targets. The phonebomber.net website charged just $20 to initiate the harassment, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Police say the two worked together with other members of Lizard Squad to run additional websites that trafficked in stolen credit card numbers and offered hacking-for-hire services alleged to have caused thousands of "denial of service" attacks worldwide.

36 comments

  1. Noobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Number one rule. Don't get caught.

    1. Re:Noobs by murdocj · · Score: 2

      Number one rule: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

      cue the "boo hoo, he was just using a computer" chorus.

    2. Re:Noobs by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most criminals, especially young ones cannot deal with what is required for that: Don't brag, don't get greedy, keep your ego in check, etc. One reason is that smart people realize that most crime does not pay in the long run and that the crime that does (running a bank, becoming a CEO with excessive compensation, etc.) is very hard to get into.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Noobs by h33t+l4x0r · · Score: 1

      Or how about, if you want to be a hacker, move to North Korea.

    4. Re:Noobs by ScentCone · · Score: 1

      Indeedlydoo!

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    5. Re:Noobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And most drug (including heroin) addicts live out their lives with no one knowing the better.

    6. Re:Noobs by Dahamma · · Score: 1

      The point in general is taken, but as applied to bank CEOs - it's getting hard to name a major international bank that hasn't been fined hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in the past 5-10 years.

      Why is it the CEO gets credit (in the form of utterly MASSIVE - tens to hundreds of million - bonuses) for bank profits, but no punishment when the bank commits wholesale fraud, laundering, or other crimes that collectively screw investors and customers out of BILLIONS?

      Why shouldn't populists be absolutely fucking pissed off when a bank executive's department defrauds customers for millions, fires thousands of lackeys doing the dirty work, and then gets a golden parachute worth hundreds of millions? If this was 100+ years ago and the oligarchs didn't also firmly control the police and military states, there would literally be heads rolling....

    7. Re:Noobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But I don't like dial-up speeds and those camps they send you so you can concentrate better.

    8. Re:Noobs by ruir · · Score: 1

      Or move to the USA. Sheep that does believe in political fear mongering. North Koreans eat kids too?

    9. Re: Noobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      North Korean defector says North Korea has program of children eating, you heard it first on Slashdot!

    10. Re:Noobs by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Hackers (in terms of the general criminal hacking) is just a scummy crime. Akin to shooting randomly in the street. Sure most of the time no one will get hurt, but sometimes people do. You are trying to target an Evil bank. Well those servers are in the same data center as a hospital. So you DDOS attack prevented timely movement of health information so your parents who were in the hospital may had to wait 5 minutes longer for that critical result that could had saved their life, if they got that data earlier.

      Oh when that happens the data center will get a lot of heat for not being setup to deal with a DDOS attack. However that is like blaming your landlord for not giving proper locks on your door, after you got robbed. In short the robber is to blame.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    11. Re:Noobs by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      It's because we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a managementist society. For a variety of reasons (risk, diversification, buying power), people have been convinced to chop up their "capital" into tiny bits so they really have any say in how it's used by the people who use it.

      Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.

      --
      Cheap storage VM.
    12. Re:Noobs by phorm · · Score: 1

      Well, it seems to me that running as a "business" you have to advertise somehow, which inevitably is going to leave a trail back to you.

    13. Re:Noobs by aceboomblain · · Score: 1

      Were these guys really "hackers"? It sounded to me that they would make prank calls on their customers behalf. If that is hacking, then so was having a fax machine call your co-workers phone back in the 90s.

    14. Re:Noobs by murdocj · · Score: 1

      Well, head on over and let us know how it's going in the socialist paradise. Just don't accidentally get in front of any AA guns.

    15. Re:Noobs by Dahamma · · Score: 1

      It's because we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a managementist society. For a variety of reasons (risk, diversification, buying power), people have been convinced to chop up their "capital" into tiny bits so they really have any say in how it's used by the people who use it.

      Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.

      Eh, both of those statements pretty much ARE the definition of capitalism. I don't think most people understand the origin of the term of the philosophy. Back in the 1500-1800 range when capitalism really started taking hold, capitalism ie. private ownership of the major means of production was as much or more in the hands of a few rich people as it is today. If anything, the 20th century was the most non-capitalist period in modern world history - the (upper) middle class had investment power, unions and pension managers could use the collective funds of blue collar workers to influence corporate direction, and in some cases employees actually collectively owned a significant share of their companies.

      Unfortunately, the 21st century has destroyed a lot of that progress (your Google comment is one example) - money is quickly being consolidated in the hands of a few super-wealthy. To me calling them "capitalists" vs "managers" is just semantics, since the 16th-19th century "princes of industry" (form the Medicis to the Rockefellers, with many others in between) aren't much different from the 21st century "Internet billionaires"...

    16. Re:Noobs by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      Your wrong, none of this is new. Check out, The Big Change, pop down to chapter 16.
      If you read this whole book, you will really be surprised at how similar things are to the things happening in our lifetime. I was.

      --
      Cheap storage VM.
    17. Re:Noobs by Dahamma · · Score: 1

      Read a bit, realized it's useless and I don't care, which I guess is the whole point, old boss same as the new boss, won't get fooled again...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  2. Also at krebsonsecurity.com by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    The story is also reported at krebsonsecurity.com.

  3. Sure, these guys are going to prison... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...But Larry Wall still isn't behind bars. I guess that just shows that "conspiring to cause damage to protected computers" is a malleable term.

    1. Re:Sure, these guys are going to prison... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Forget Larry, how about we indict Satya Nadella on the same charges. "Conspiring to cause damage to protected computers" is his company's entire business model.

  4. "but he won't be allowed to access the Internet" by wolfgang_spangler · · Score: 1

    "but he won't be allowed to access the Internet"

    How exactly is that enforced nowadays?

  5. Re:"but he won't be allowed to access the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By if you get caught You Go to Big Boy Jail.

    Ya Feeling Luck Punk?

  6. Re:"but he won't be allowed to access the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By cutting their throats?

  7. Reporting Offshore Computer Crimes. by rtb61 · · Score: 2

    This multi-national prosecution tends to prove the value in reporting offshore computer crimes. You can report them locally but it can be far more beneficial to report crimes coming from overseas to overseas criminal investigation agencies. Now many would think there is no value in reporting those off shore crimes as nothing will happen but that is not true. Whilst those investigatory agencies might not do much to pursue the crimes against you, they will still likely kickoff an investigation to target the accused individual because the likely reality is, they will also be committing crimes in that region as well. So whilst you might not get direct justice, you can still get indirect justice, better some justice than none.

    --
    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    1. Re:Reporting Offshore Computer Crimes. by Nidi62 · · Score: 1

      This multi-national prosecution tends to prove the value in reporting offshore computer crimes.

      On a related note, and not sure why it hasn't made Slashdot yet as we often rail against it, but just a few days ago in India several hundred people were arrested for operating call centers running those IRS scams (because we all know the IRS attempts to collect back taxes by using Indian call centers /sarcasm). So it does happen occasionally.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  8. Oh good, the FBI is on the case by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They did such a great job with Clinton! Maybe they should have a better skilled team work on this one, like the Girl Scouts or the Texas Longhorns glee club.

    1. Re:Oh good, the FBI is on the case by Boronx · · Score: 1

      When will Donald publish his personal emails? The world awaits with baited breath.

      --
      Play Command HQ online
    2. Re:Oh good, the FBI is on the case by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When will Donald publish his personal emails? The world awaits with baited breath.

      Will the baited breath help catch the phishing emails?

  9. this will not go well for them. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    they should prepare for disproportionate punishment because poking the 800 pound gorilla never ends well. i mean, they probably would get less time if they just murdered someone.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  10. Re: Yet another of America's masters walks free... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Black hackers don't get caught, but they're out there, like ninjas.

  11. Re:"but he won't be allowed to access the Internet by DavidHumus · · Score: 1

    Apparently, by mom.