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Martin SFP Bryant
FounderMartin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-qualit Martin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-quality, compelling content for them. He previously served in several roles at TNW, including Editor-in-Chief. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new.
A word of advice to any police reading this – if you’re going to bust hackers, expect to get hacked. Oh, and it helps if you actually password protect your data.
Police in Melbourne, Australia recently attempted a sting on a hacker forum called r00t-y0u.org. Taking control of an administrator’s account they began collecting evidence against members of the ring.
They posted a message on the forum warning members that they were under surveillance (which seems a bit counter-productive) and completely unsurprisingly one hacker launched a counter-offensive.
The Age reports:
“The hacker appears to have been provoked by a message published on the r00t-y0u.org site by the federal police, warning members they were under surveillance and that “all member IP addresses have been logged“, with some arrests having already been made.
A hacker broke into the federal police’s computer system and, according to a source close to the investigation, accessed both police evidence and intelligence about federal police systems such as its IP addresses”.
Police have denied any sensitive data was compromised but the hacker is reported to have left messages at Pastebin.com, a site used by coders, showing proof that he had accessed files containing fake IDs and stolen credit card numbers. The hacker also mocked the police for leaving the database password blank.
Seriously, it’s one thing to use a bad password but it’s a whole other level of stupidity to use no password at all.
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