If it had been me, I would have broken into the phone company system, so I could have had direct access to the messages of all their customers. What News Corp. did, guess pin codes, spoofing voicemails, that is amateur script kiddie stuff.
— Kevin Mitnick, reformed criminal hacker, in Betabeat
Wired more thoroughly explains the Aaron Swartz hacking case that we’ve followed on Slacktory — wherein the activist is accused of breaking into an MIT computer to download the JSTOR scholarly article database, at one point using a bike helmet as a mask to hide from security cameras.
Sez Wired: Swartz pleaded not guilty and he’s due back in court in September. Current consensus is that he wanted the docs as a data set for a paper (like this Stanford Law Review piece.) It’s just the federal government bringing these charges. JSTOR says they didn’t take it to the Feds, and that they got all their documents back. So why is this worth an investigation?
Ohhhh man. Plenty of new shit has come to light in the case of Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder (or just ex-employee), who was indicted today for the alleged theft of four million JSTOR documents via an MIT computer. But the best detail, taken from the filed indictment:
On January 6, 2011, Swartz returned to the wiring closet to remove his computer equipment. This time he attempted to evade identification at the entrance to the restricted area. As Swartz entered the wiring closet, he held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet. Swartz then removed his computer equipment from the closet, put it in his backpack, and left, again masking his face with the bicycle helmet before peering through a crack in the double doors and cautiously stepping out.
LulzSec hacks the Sun. Apparently confirmed on their Twitter account, even though the Anonymous-spinoff hacking group admits they supposedly quit their 50-day campaign in late June.
The sillier the names and the louder the “we did it for the lulz” schtick, the more a given hacker group seems to be pushing agendas. It’s enough to make even a moralfag like me wonder what kind of world we’re in, when we can’t rely on amoral jerkoffs to remain amoral jerkoffs.
[Guardian]
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