Suggestion: Don't Name Your Illegal Computer Spying Business 'Hackers Are Us'
from the just-a-tip dept
While everyone has different ways of going about marketing various businesses, you would think that if you're involved in something illegal, you wouldn't refer to your organization in a way that reveals the illegality of what you're doing. Apparently, a private detective firm in the UK had a separate group which they proudly named "Hackers Are Us," which was making quite a bit of money by helping people get info from the computers' of others. There's no real mystery (and no real "hacking") in how they did so. They just sent an email and used some social engineering to convince people to click on the attachment, which loaded a keylogger. Pretty straightforward. Of course, the group is now in court trying to defend these actions -- but the use of the name probably doesn't help.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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1st !
reminiscent of out current head cop, Mr. Gonzales.
Pigs on the Web !
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had to be careful myself..
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Dogs
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...now I know, who woulda thunk it?
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Re: ...now I know, who woulda thunk it?
phunny cuz itz tru yo
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hacking is not illegal
It seems the poster here has fallen into the same habit that the media has. The habit of thinking of hackers as simply people who make viruses, used obscure security flaws to access restricted data, and cause mayhem for amusement.
Hacking is not limited or restricted to computers or even electronics. Hacking simply put is the act of finding ways around the intended functionality of an item in order to achieve something not normally possible with it. This could be getting an apache web server to spit out the contents of the server root folder or it could be getting the security dude at a companies front desk to hand out information about the system that allows you to compromise it.
Further more not all hacks are illegal as not all hacks involve gaining access to restricted information.
In short I have two major issues with the post. The idea that hacking is inherently illegal, and the idea that hacking is restricted entirely to technical endeavors.
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Re: hacking is not illegal
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good ole lawyers
If they did however invade another persons computer and start monitoring it without prior consent, well I'm sure they'd bring up some other court ruling pointing out that by opening and clicking whatever was necessary to install the malicious software in the first place, although perhaps done with complete ignorance, was indeed consensual agreement. Considering the guy’s a “banking heir” I’m going to bet he can afford the legal fees to defeat what meager taxes can do.
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Now assuming they dont have virus protection, the server will be running once they open the file. Now you need their IP address. Easy. "Hey, nothing happened." Oh really, here's where I downloaded it from, (link here) Now it's not really a link its your IP address and you should be running a IP grabber. And thats it. Open sub7, enter IP address and connect.
Of course these days things are harder with computers being behind routers and firewalls. The above example was good about 5 years ago and I haven't checked to see if the program has been updated to work around it.
sub7 was the most popular back in the day. It really gave you full control. My buddies and I used to load it on the computers in the lab and prank everyone during classs since we were always there early. We'd do stupid shit like open drives, flip their screens upsidedownbackwards, make porno pop up. It was hilarious. We'd even record sleazy AIM convos, copy them, and throw em around the halls before the lunch bell. Good times.
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Re: hacking is not illegal
"I'm sure most of us would argue with you" was supposed to read "I'm sure most of us would agree with you." Sorry for the confusion.
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I do tend to think that anybody stupid enough to use questionable legal methods with such an obvious name (l33t@hackers_r_us.co.uk) should be jailed though..
(side note- whats with the non-capitalizing n00bs on the thread? The word "hacker" attract them all from gizoogle?)
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