Castlecops attacker arrested
This news broke while I was overseas, with no internet access, and it is quite ironic that I did not notice it before now, especially considering I referred to the attacks against Castlecops during my presentation at www.securitycampoz.com. It is embarrassing how far out of touch I have fallen in the space of just a few weeks.
Anyway, a person alleged to be behind a DDOS attacks against Castlecops has been arrested.
Indictment and arrest document here
"United States Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced today the arrest of GREG KING, 21, of Fairfield, California, and the unsealing of an Indictment returned on September 27, 2007, charging KING with four counts of electronic transmission of codes to cause damage to protected computers.
This case is the product of an extensive investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to Assistant United States Attorney Matthew D. Segal, a prosecutor with the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who is handling the case, the Indictment alleges that KING used a “botnet” to attack computer servers. A botnet is a network of infected computers that, unbeknownst to their owners, are compromised by a hacker and programmed to respond to a hacker’s commands. The infected computers are referred to as “bots,” “zombies,” or “drones.” According to documents filed with the court, KING allegedly controlled over seven thousand such “bots” and used them to conduct multiple distributed denial of service attacks against websites of two businesses. In a distributed denial of service attack, a hacker directs a large number of infected computers (“bots”) to flood a victim computer with information and thereby disable the target computer. On the Internet, KING was also known as “Silenz, Silenz420, sZ, GregK, and Gregk707.”
Indictment here - the indictment makes for interesting reading. The sheer naivety of people like King, who think that they can hide behind smart-ass passwords and the use of Gmail, Yahoo and wireless internet access at McDonalds and Best Buy is staggering. Oh, and as for his attempt to hide his laptop under some bushes in the garden? Puhlease, who was he trying to fool?
It reminds me of the "good old days" when the script kiddies used various virus generators to create a "virus attachment of the week", fooling themselves into thinking they were l33t coders. Uh, yeah, not. Sadly, nowadays, the script kiddies are a spent force and we are now fighting against organised, professional organisations (King, by the way, does not qualify for the category of professional, or organised).