Posted 08/23/09 at 08:06:44 PM by Justin Kerr

Making a high profile hacker arrest is respectable accomplishment, but bragging about it to his friends on the community forums is clearly a bad idea. I’m sure you didn’t need to be told this, but apparently it’s a lesson the Australian Police Department had to learn the hard way. In a recently televised take down broadcast on ABC’s Four Corners, Australian investigators raided, and sized computer equipment belonging to the administrator of an underground hacking forum located at r00t.y0u.org. Following the arrest, interrogators were able to obtain passwords, and began using the site as a honey pot to try and expose other potential suspects.

Unfortunately for Police word of the arrest leaked out quickly, and it didn’t take long for the community to discover something was up. Matters were further complicated when the police agency began taunting the forums visitors by saying “all member IP addresses have been logged, and arrests are being made”. Enraged by the comments, members of the hacker community broke into the system police were using during the investigation and supposedly gained access to intelligence contained within the federal police mainframe.

The hacker posted his own retort to the Australian police on pastebin.com mocking them for busting a couple of “script kiddies” and posted pictures of fake IDs and stolen credit card numbers lifted from police servers. The hacker continued by claiming “I couldn’t stop laughing on seeing that the federal police server was running Windows”. Apparently the MYSQL password was also left blank (opps!). Apparently this 30 minute long hack could have been faster if he “didn’t stop to laugh so much”.

Police claim the files were intentionally planted on the compromised system. Anyone buy that?

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Posted 10/18/07 at 10:36:52 AM by Erin Simon

After a blogger files for reexamination, Amazon's One-Click patent is invalidated by the PTO.

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