Oz Kopz r00t-you.org bust
p2pnet news view | Crime:- Boy, were their faces red.
Federal and local cops in Melbourne, Australia, that is.
Police computer security experts, “claimed responsibility for taking over the r00t-you.org cybercrime forum as part of a sting operation,” says The Register.
But a federal police boast about the break-up of the “underground hacker forum” backfired when hackers hacked a federal police computer system, says The Sydney Morning Herald.
“Security consultants say police appear to have been using the computer as a honeypot to collect information on members of the forum but the scheme came undone after the officers forgot to set a password,” says the story.
Says the story »»»
Police were monitoring the forum by logging into the account of the administrator they had raided, but this aroused suspicion among members who knew the raid had taken place.
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.
A spokeswoman for the federal police confirmed that the hacker broke into a computer system used in its investigation but denied that any evidence was compromised, saying the computer was not connected to other federal police systems.
“These dipshits are using an automatic digital forensics and incident response tool,” the SMH has the hacker saying, adding:
“All of this [hacking] had been done within 30-40 minutes. Could of been faster if I didn’t stop to laugh so much.”
The Register – Bungling cybercops’ r00t-y0u.org sting backfires, August 18, 2009
The Sydney Morning Herald – Hackers break into police computer as sting backfires, August 18, 2009
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August 19th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Hmmmm. Not amused.
The Australian Federal Computer Crime Squad are actually quite a nice bunch of guys – or so I learned in 1995 when my ISP was hacked by a “I wanna famous for 5 minutes” type of idiot.
Making fun of the boys in blue – fun as it may be, is just not Kosher.
After all, they are there to save you, your credit card, your bank account from being fraudulently accessed and to stop and interdict pictures of small people being distributed.
If they were tracking some hackers, it was probably with good reason.
The fact that they were doing so with inadequate tools is unfortunately fairly normal in an arena where the bad guys are usually (at least) one step ahead of the good guys.
I certainly don’t think an article detailing their shortcomings is warranted.