Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Hacker Paid in Dodgy Web Tools for U.S. Attack

Via The New Zealand Herald.

The American man jailed yesterday for hacking a University of Pennsylvania computer server "effectively hired" a New Zealand teenager to carry out an attack on internet chat groups, a prosecutor says.

Ryan Goldstein, 22, a student at the university, online offered Whitianga teenager Owen Thor Walker log-in rights to a website and malicious "trojan horse" software, Michael Levy, chief of computer crimes with the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

In return Walker, known online as AKILL, agreed to train his botnet on Goldstein's targets.

"Did he pay him? It's in internet currency: 'Here's some tools for your kit bag,"' he said. "Did he send him money through this Paypal account? No."

Internet news website NetworkWorld.com said today Goldstein wanted to wage an online war with three IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks and a now-defunct website called ssgroup.org,

He was angry after being banned from at least one of the forums, and he talked the 18 year-old New Zealander into launching a distributed denial-of-service attack against these networks.

More here.

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