Internet has come about to play a critical role in our lives. More so, for the corporate sector, it has become the very life and breathe of numerous businesses. But the hacking tools widely available also have made the online presence a vulnerable option. A 15-year old has been reported to be arrested for hacking and defacing a whooping 259 companies within three months.
It was more of an escape from boredom for the 15-year old than anything else. Being quite anti-social, the boy wanted to find an indulgence. Incidentally, he stumbled upon a hacker forum that would award points to its members for accomplishing hacking feats.
The boy was excited at the opportunity and making use of different hacking tools, he was able to break into some 259 websites within three months. He didn’t go after any certain kind of websites, rather he hacked into different business websites, ranging from tourist services to sports companies and others. Within three months, he was among the top 50 hackers of the hacker forum which featured a total of some 2,000 users.
The 15-year-old hacker wouldn’t only break into these websites, he would also deface many of them and would then tweet about it from his Twitter account, posting links to the dumps of data acquired from these sites. Although he used different tools to hide his identity, his IP address became visible to the authorities as a result of a failure of his anonymizing tool. The nick that he used online was ‘ACK!3STX’.
Naturally, the authorities were eventually able to track him down in a home in Lower Austria and eventually had him arrested.
[ttjad]
