Cracking Down On Hackers


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Got this from a post at SpywareInfo.

- http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20040827S0003

August 27, 2004 - By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News

"Among the more than 150 cybercrime arrests and convictions announced Thursday by the Department of Justice was an original: the nation's first case alleging denial of service attacks against competitors to knock them offline. According to Attorney General John Ashcroft, six men were indicted this week by a federal grand jury in California on multiple charges for hiring hackers to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against competitors. The case illustrates “the increased use of the Internet to damage rival businesses and communicate threats for commercial advantage,†said Ashcroft in a statement. Jay Echouafni, 37, the chief executive officer of Orbit Communication, a satellite TV dealer in Sudbury, Mass., and his business partner, Paul Ashley, 30, were charged with hiring hackers in Arizona, Ohio, Louisiana, and the U.K. to launch “relentless computer attacks†against Orbit's online competitors, said Ashcroft. The remaining four indicted were the U.S. and U.K. hackers...The hired-gun hackers used bot networks, collections of previously-compromised computers, to actually conduct the DoS attacks. According to the FBI, one of the hackers controlled between 5,000 and 10,000 computers; another ruled a network of some 3,000 machines..."

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No firewall is complete safety. If someone (hacker) wants to get into your computer and they are really determined and they know what they are doing they will get in no doubt about it. It could take a long time depending on how well you are protected but if they have the time and resources they will get in evently. I would not worry if you are well protected though, because if you are a hacker will not waste his/her time with you they will go look for someone's PC that is easy to get into.

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Wow,

That is a frightening article indeed! There are hackers out there for sure. A few years ago when I was just starting out in Linux I was running an old P166 from my home, I had it set-up as an Apache server, running Caldera OpenLinux 2.3.

I didn't know anything about security and was just happily hosting a silly personal page on the unit. It was wide open to the Internet. It ran successfully until some jerk hacked it and locked me out of my root account so I couldn't remove him. I had to run fdisk and wipe the drive to get rid of him.

There are indeed lots of freaks out there.

Very cool story, thanks.

hitest :ph34r:

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