Lulzsec: UK men plead guilty to hacking charges | Hacker News Reader

Lulzsec: UK men plead guilty to hacking charges

bbc.co.uk

29 pointsgerryg22 comments

It's depressing when all the biggest governmental agencies in the world can catch are a few teenagers with scripts.

At the same time we just accept multimillion crime groups and governments wrecking havoc because they're just too darn hard to catch.

I think you nailed it there. It's the governments I find the most objectionable as they are pretty hard to bring to justice.

Indeed, it even comes on the same day the British prime minister makes a speech where he takes benefits away from the young who are struggling to find work and uses the term "culture of entitlement".

This from a landed multi-millionaire and without a hint of irony.

Got to keep the Tablian aka Mumsnet onside look at the fuss when couples earning 4 times the median Uk wage where going to have child benefit removed.

The Tories have always kept the poor as poor as possible. Its where they like them. In fact they'd rather everyone was poor.

I'm 300 quid a month down since the unelected fuckers took over and all I've seen is money pissed up the wall on that dreaded word: austerity. If I was a saving money consultant I'd be rich.

Because professional OGA's don't tend to blurt their successes all over the internet and normaly they dont target traditional criminals.

Is there a story of how they were caught? They did have pretty good protection against it. Was it a slip somewhere? Did their pride take over so they told too many of their friends, who may have turned them in?

Sabu helped the FBI. According to Wikipedia:

  On August 15, he pleaded guilty to several hacking
  charges and agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Over
  the following seven months he successfully unmasked
  the other members of the group.

To that I would add that Sabu was found because (according to what I read) he once signed into a Lulzsec IRC channel without masking his residential IP. So yes, there was a slip, which led to Sabu's cooperation.

There was a slip which led to his capture. Instead of paying the unfettered price for the crimes he committed, he ratted out his friends in a blatant abuse of the system in order to lessen his punishment.

The lesson for today kids, is never commit a crime alone, so you have someone to rat out on for that plea deal!

Why are plea bargains to help capture more people an abuse of the system?

Agreed. I'd rather see all of them go down with lessened punishment than one go down while the rest are off the hook. Although I don't like plea bargains which let the squealer off the hook.

That's the point. If they were doing their job and interrogating well as well as investigating well they'd catch them all just like Sabu. Unfortunately they're not and it's easier to offer a plea deal after a short period of intimidation so they do that. I think they should all pay, but this way they just abuse something built into the system that was made as an incentive for people they didn't think they COULD catch otherwise.

With Sabu, they caught him on mere chance. He connected directly to IRC from his home address, without proxies or going to a wifi hotspot to hide himself. Not everyone will make that mistake, and then it becomes infinitely harder to find them. It's about resource management.

  > If they were doing their job and interrogating well
  > as well as investigating well they'd catch them all
  > just like Sabu.

They used the fact that Sabu had their trust. The idea that they would be able to plant someone in LulzSec and take then down from the insider within 7 months seems laughable.

Funny how the title says "men" and then you discover that those are just two kids of 19 and 18 years old. I was expecting to read about some serious cyber criminals...

So... you're saying they shouldn't be considered adults at age 18, then?

18 years threshold is just an odd convention. Biologically it's closer to 12 but the legal and cultural threshold varies wildly all over the planet. My rule of thumb: if you don't have to make a living - you're a kid. Enjoy it while it lasts.

By "hacking" here , they basically just mean DDOS right?

"Mr Cleary also faces charges in the US, where he stands accused of breaking into a number of websites, including that of the US X Factor, in order to deface them and steal personal details."

When they call Anonymous a hacking collective, you know they're either too stupid, or too corrupt to say it like it is.

They're just a bunch of stupid kids, and I wouldn't label what Anonymous as a whole is doing as hacking regardless of how you painted it. Lulzsec on the hand...are a bunch of kids who learned TRICKS before they gained the knowledge that comes with it.

After years of learning and you get to a point of finding exploits yourself, you understand at this point WHY doing things is a bad idea.

They skipped the learning phase and just learned some stupid tricks that allowed them to do a lot of damage while knowing little.

It brings to mind the old infosec adage: What's the difference between hacking and pentesting? Permission.

The best hackers learn quickly to become security researchers/GRC/application security/etc. The rest end up in jail or swimming in debt from the lawsuits. It's okay to break things as long as you've been given permission to break them, and generally that permission comes with a clause to give advice on how to make sure it doesn't get broken again.

It's natural selection in the hacker realm. If you want to survive, you have to play by the rules.

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