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Australian Police Bust Hacker Ring Only to Have It Backfire

by Caleb Johnson on August 18, 2009 at 05:35 PM

What began as a major assault on an underground hacker forum last Wednesday soon became a major embarrassment for Australian police. While authorities may or may not have learned valuable information about the hackers, they've certainly learned a lesson in humility.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, hackers broke into a federal police computer system days after the same police bragged about busting up that very hacker ring on the television show 'Four Corners.' Last Wednesday, federal and Victoria police raided a location suspected to be connected with the administrator of r00t-y0u.org, an Australian hacker forum with about 5,000 members, and seized control of the forum in order to glean information about its members. There was just one problem. One of the hackers, delighted to find that the federal cops had "left [their server's] MYSQL password blank," had no trouble in accessing the feds' computer, stealing police files, and posting evidence of his exploits on the document-sharing site Pastebin.com -- all in all, making authorities look very foolish.


A police spokeswoman tried to downplay the breach, stating: "The [purloined] information consists of directory file names of previously compromised credentials. No information or files exist that have, or could have, been compromised." Whether or not this is true, authorities surely didn't plan on the investigation taking this turn. Maybe the police should've covered all bases before puffing up their chests on TV and placing a big ol' bulls-eye on their backs. [From: The Sydney Morning Herald]

Tags: australia, computer, forums, hack, police, top

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