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Posts with tag ddos

Teen Cybercrime "Mastermind" Puts On White Hat, Walks Free

by Tim Stevens, posted Jul 15th 2008 at 3:18PM

Teen Cybercrime
Owen Thor Walker is 18, a kid from New Zealand with a talent for computers. He's also one of the world's most important criminal masterminds when it comes to cybercrime, having been arrested late last year for leading an international online syndicate, stealing money from bank accounts, initiating distributed denial of service attacks against any target he liked, and causing over $20-million in losses worldwide. He was facing up to 10 years in prison for his crimes, yet he walked away a free man earlier today after striking a deal with the forces who arrested him.

Walker has been recruited by the New Zealand police force to help them track and fight cybercrime in his home nation, trading in his black hat for a white one. He did get stuck paying an $11,000 fine, which seems rather paltry compared to the damages he caused, and had to turn all in his computer equipment, making us think N.Z. still doesn't quite trust him. In the end, with a small slap on the wrist and a new career ahead of him in the security business, it's almost like he's come out ahead from this deal, something that won't exactly discourage others from following in his footsteps. [Source: ABC News]

Hackers Take Out Scientology Web Site

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jan 29th 2008 at 11:30AM


Well, it looks like the war is on. The Church of Scientology's attempts to squash circulation of a video of Tom Cruise last week seem to have been the final straw for a group that calls itself "Anonymous." According to a recent report in Wired, the cryptically-named organization recently stated that its main goal is to destroy the leadership of the Church of Scientology.

The first public salvo was launched over the past couple of days as a group of hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous took down the home page of the Church with repeated distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS attacks flood target servers with requests, so that they become overwhelmed with data and shut down. This results in a site that doesn't work, which is exactly what visitors to the Scienology Web site experienced during the attack. The attacks flooded Scientology's Web servers with as much as 220 megabits per-second, which security experts claim is a mid-sized attack.

While this attack is not the largest of its kind ever seen, it does show some level of organization, "It's not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this," said Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks. The church has since moved its site to servers run by Prolexic Technologies, a company that specialized in protection from DDOS attacks.

From Wired (via InfoWorld)

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