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