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Thread: Police Grab Hacker Suspects In Canada, Taiwan

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    Default Police Grab Hacker Suspects In Canada, Taiwan

    Police Grab Hacker Suspects In Canada, Taiwan

    Authorities in Canada and Taiwan this week brought charges against a teen for creating a worm and arrested a 30-year-old engineer for building a destructive Trojan horse, respectively.

    On Wednesday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced it had charged an unidentified 16-year-old from the Mississauga, Ontario, area with a variety of computer-related crimes, including mischief to data and fraudulent use of computer systems, in connection with the Randex worm family.

    The RCMP investigation, which was led by its tech crime unit based in London, led to the teen, who is accused of writing multiple variations of the worm and using them to hijack as many as 9,000 computers.

    Randex contains a list of commonly used passwords that can hack Windows PCs. While original variants spread via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and file-sharing networks such as KaZaa, later versions are able to propagate via shared folders on a network. Once in place, Randex lets the attacker control the machine through an IRC.

    According to the RCMP, the purloined PCs could be used as spam generators, or commands could be issued to crash the machine.

    "Once a hacker has remote control of your PC they can use it for whatever twisted purpose they desire," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, in a statement. "They could read your confidential files, steal data, or launch thousands of spam messages from your computer."

    The youth is scheduled to appear in juvenile court next Thursday, June 3.

    In Taiwan, meanwhile, police on Thursday arrested a 30-year-old computer engineer for allegedly writing a Trojan horse dubbed "Peep," then distributing it to Chinese hackers for attacks on the island's computers, including those used by the Taiwanese government.

    Identified by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau as Wang Ping-an, the engineer placed the Peep Trojan on popular hacker sites.

    "He told us that he created the program because he has nothing to do after work because he does not have a girlfriend. So he decided to spend his time on computers instead," Eric Lee, head of the country's National Police Administration's Internet Crime Investigation Squad was quoted in the Taipei Times newspaper.

    Taiwanese officials claim that the Trojan was used to steal data from and damage government computers in the Presidential Office and the Ministry of National Defense, as well as machines in more than 200 private firms and schools.

    Lee was also quoted in the Taipei Times as claiming that Wang has been dubbed "the glory of Taiwanese hackers" on Web sites because he allegedly taught Chinese hackers how to attack Taiwanese computers.

    "If [he's] found guilty it's quite possible that he will receive a tough sentence, particularly as it is being suggested that the Trojan may have left open a backdoor for Chinese hackers to exploit," said Sophos' Cluley.

    Wang could face up to five years in jail if convicted.

    The charges and arrests in Canada and Taiwan follow other high-profile cases in such countries as Germany, where earlier this month police charged an 18-year-old with creating the Sasser worm.

    http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNe...cleID=21400426

  2. #2
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    Default Re: Police Grab Hacker Suspects In Canada, Taiwan

    To me it appears that the police are only able to catch virus writers... what about the hacke cracker? :-\

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