Heartbleed hack case sees first arrest in Canada
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It's not clear to me that the hacker was malicious.
That said, governments are _not_ hacker-friendly like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Never hack the government thinking you're doing them a favor, they will never see it that way. You will be arrested.
"Regrettably, the CRA has been notified by the Government of Canada's lead security agencies of a malicious breach of taxpayer data that occurred over a six-hour period."
That seems to be implying that another government agency (RCMP? CSEC?) monitors at least the CRA network and does some kind of deep packet inspection and/or packet logging. So are they logging every packet that gets sent to the CRA network? Or did they know about it beforehand and could detect it in real time with an IDS?
"Shared Services Canada was created on August 4, 2011 to fundamentally transform how the Government manages its information technology (IT) infrastructure. Its mandate for the provision of enterprise-wide IT-infrastructure services represents better value for money and a more reliable IT infrastructure to support modern government operations."
If a central agency is managing security for various important government systems, they may have full packet capture logging for up to the past 48 hours or longer.
An analyst may have downloaded the entire packet capture and used a tool like Wireshark to drill down into all heartbeat requests, and then use filters to find suspicious and malformed requests. One example of how they could do this is with the advice given here: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/55533
Also, the US may be similar to Canada in this respect. I believe the Department of Homeland Security[0] handles a lot of the network security for much of the federal government.
I suspect the Canadian authorities aren't as ruthless with their computer crime laws as the prosecutors are here, but you never know. Any idea what the kid is facing in terms of punishment??
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Canadian_Criminal_Law/Offences...
> is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years, or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
He mentions a school assignment for "CS2212" which means he is likely a CS student at Western University in Canada.
Edit: parent comment was edited after I posted this.
I found the fact he is a CS student relevant to the news article. As is the fact he has a git repo where he coded a Java crypto library, when he's being accused of exploiting a crypto library.
There will be plenty of time to rummage through his life, internet and not, no need to rush into it.
"Person accused of hacking good with computers, uses them" isn't exactly a revelation.
If find that those type of comments, event if well intended, in the end they are not helpful. First because dmix wasn't "rummaging through his life" but pointing out public facts related to his abilities has a coder.
Second because I wonder when will be the time to discuss this? Once nobody talk about it anymore and it becomes completely irrelevant and forgotten? Now is the exact time to discuss this.
Of course he's from my town, and of course he's taking computer science. This was my first instinct when I heard of the case, that it was some kid thinking he was safe behind his computer screen. I only say this because I seen it A LOT in this town while going to school.