7 ms·
Teen hackers who live streamed cyber-attack on TfL jailed
- jonathanlydall 2mo agoRemembering back, I certainly lacked a lot of critical reasoning which could have led me to do possibly equally stupid stuff like this had I the skill in my early teens. As I remember it, life felt more like a "game" in that you do whatever it lets you, without much consideration of whether people will be (potentially very) upset with what you've done. In person activities stood high risk of getting caught, but online it seems more like a computer game and the people on the other side of your actions feel more abstract. Many years back when I used to do CS for WoW, a colleague of mine liked to say that the only reason some kids shit-talk the way they do is because it's online and if they tried it in person they'd get punched in the face. These kids discovered that their actions have consequences to them in person and not just someone being upset with them remotely. As a parent now (but oldest is only 5), it's stories like this which make me determined remain aware of the kind of stuff my kids get up to and continually explain that actions have consequences, even if those consequences are seemingly as trivial as making someone else feel shit about themselves. I wonder if maybe 10 or so years from now, after these kids have actually reached decent emotional maturity, that they'll look back at their actions and think about how stupidly reckless and needlessly destructive they were, to both others and their own lives.
- grim_io 2mo agoWith their skills and nowhere to go, they will be doing this for the government.
- grubbs 2mo agoI think this was true in the 90s and 2000s. When not everyone was a script kiddie. But why hire someone that literally didn't write their own exploit? Sounds like the most advanced thing they did was just social engineering and dumping a DB.
- jfyi 2mo agoYou remember a way different 90's than I do. It was just simpler back then. There was no aslr, no hardware level protection from execution, traffic was all plaintext, switches didn't exist, or maybe they did but just nobody used them and everything on every network was just one giant collision domain, developers by and large didn't even think about securing software outside of DRM, and absolutely nobody understood the basic premise that someone on the phone may be lying to your business to get access to things they want. The skillset that made you a 1337 h4x0r in the 90's makes you a mediocre sysadmin these days.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agodisagree. back then you were an autodydact. i can get on YT or some AI and find how to do virtually all of the stuff you mentioned, but back then you had to roll your own and figure it out yourself but i am generally in alignment with the idea that they're not getting gub'mnt jobs now. 1) how could you trust them? and 2) there is a global glut of talent, including laid-off FAANG / big-org talent that you could scoop up. why take a risk with an idiot who can't keep his ego in check long enough to maintain OpSec when you can hire a senior security engineer just laid off from Oracle with an MIT pedigree? 30 years ago the 133t haxor types were rare, but now they're churning out cybersecurity grads to the point of oversaturation.
- jfyi 2mo agoI had books that I scoured from the visiting nurses book sale every year and phrack. That's not much different than yt or ai. I guess there was less direct context with the books, but grasping the basics got you further. It's ok that we disagree though.
- swarnie 2mo agoI doubt it, these kids are never getting clearance. I expect to find them at an MSP with a firm equal opportunities policy.
- inigyou 2mo agoNow I have the opposite feeling. I know that if I ever do something useful that people like, I'll go to jail for it. I don't know how startup founders do it, I guess they need legal backing from an incubator.
- williamdclt 2mo agoI don't understand what you mean, can you explain?
- inigyou 2mo agoLet's say I invented a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments, I'd go to jail for doing that (Tornado Cash). Let's say I made a secure messenger, I'd go to jail for that (Telegram, EncroChat, SkyECC) or narrowly avoid jail (Session) or be forced to add a backdoor (Anom). Let's say I made an operating system that didn't spy on you, I'd be threatened with jail for that (GrapheneOS). And of course there are more things, for which there will be more consequences (mostly jail) but for things that haven't been done yet there are obviously no examples offhand. Basically everything that fits outside of existing patterns is illegal one way or another. Only people who are naïve to these consequences will ever be motivated to make these things.
- filoleg 2mo ago> Let's say I invented a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments, I'd go to jail for doing that (Tornado Cash) This is just a disingenuous take. Tornado Cash founder didn't get criminally convicted for "a genius way go use cryptography to send anonymous payments." He got convicted for operating a money-laundering service. The fact that his service utilized "a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments" is entirely orthogonal to the actual crime he got in trouble for. He would have gotten convicted just the same regardless of the cryptography usage, because the actual crime here was operating a money-laundering service.
- inigyou 2mo ago
- jfyi 2mo ago10 years and they'll be mid way into their conference talk career. You know, that sweet spot where you can keep telling the same story over and over and still get attention for it. That makes me wonder what Frank Abagnale has been up to recently.
- bityard 2mo agoNot sure if you're aware already and omitted it for brevity but maybe for others who might not already know: Abignale made up everything (or nearly everything) he claimed to have done in his book and in the movie. He was still taking advantage of people during this time, but the acts were far more mundane (and slimy) than his claims. He was a con man for sure, but not the "brilliant but misguided criminal gets redemption" that he portrays.
- irishcoffee 2mo agoIt isn't surprising though, him lying about his past. A con man is a con man, after all.
- jfyi 2mo agoNope, I never heard that. It doesn't surprise me one bit though. I found his talks sort of robotic, and having caught a handful, very rote. I always thought he didn't have the demeanor of the person he claimed to be.
- rolph 2mo ago"Frank, if you go out that door the french are gonna kill you!"
- beng-nl 2mo agoSay what you want about Frank abagnale.. but damn can he tell a compelling story.
- Kichererbsen 2mo agoI have found that keeping dialog open from early age on helps a lot. If kids get into trouble when they do something they're not allowed to, they're going to learn to stop telling you stuff real quick. And hide their activities. If they learn that you'll stay calm and continually prove that you trust them to handle their stuff, they might end up telling you things you wouldn't expect. But then... you don't get to blow your lid. Ever.
- Aeolun 2mo agoYou can absolutely blow your lid, you just have to apologize afterwards and admit that you were wrong. This is very hard for some adults to do to a 5 year old.
- ilinx 2mo agoI understand that some people have trouble apologizing to children, but could someone help me understand why? I’ve been a parent for almost a decade now, and I can’t count the number of important teaching and bonding moments that have started with me making a parenting mistake and apologizing for it. I rely on it pretty heavily to teach my kid about emotional regulation. It’s such an important opportunity to just throw away. Is it an ego thing? Do people struggle to see children as people? I promise those are good-faith questions. I know some people struggle more with that sort of thing, and that’s fine. We all have our strengths.
- LoganDark 2mo ago
- Aurornis 2mo agoFrom the arrival: > Jubair has 22 previous convictions related to hacking, fraud and harassment. There’s more to what was going on here and none of us is really qualified to diagnose the psychology behind it from the details. I hope they can find some peace later in life because they are obviously not lacking ambition or ability
- illliillll 2mo agoIt’s extremely easy for a kid to commit tens, or even hundreds of crimes in a matter of hours on the internet.
- harvey9 2mo agoLacking ability to cover their tracks.
- exe34 2mo agoOr hire them into gchq on a short leash.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agowayyy to much ambition, not enough ability (to STFU and follow OpSec) getting in is often the easy part. getting out, undetected, with stuff that matters, is the hard part.
- folkrav 2mo agoBehavior being different online than in real life is not limited to kids either. Nobody on Facebook is meaner than a 60-something year old lady with a wall full of cat pictures and minion memes. I genuinely doubt that half of them would hold the same discourse face to face.
- pixl97 2mo agoWith the number of 'crazy karen' and 'crazy kyle' videos online, maybe over half of them would.
- thejokeisonme 2mo agoYou used to do computer science for world of warcraft?! Sounds cool!
- jareklupinski 2mo agono they did Content Sharing for Weekend on Wednesdays
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoHe admin'd their Counter Strike server.
- inigyou 2mo agoCustomer support
- stavros 2mo agoI don't know, I was reading the article and went "well, good for them, if they could get into the system, fair play". Then I saw the part where they stole tons of data and inconvenienced people, and I can't support that. If you hack into a system and leave a note "I got into your system, I win", more power to you. If you do damage, go to prison.
- 1970-01-01 2mo ago>Many years back when I used to do CS for WoW, a colleague of mine liked to say that the only reason some kids shit-talk the way they do is because it's online and if they tried it in person they'd get punched in the face. This is the #1 reason bots exist. We can't just punch them down anymore, we're flagged as bad people.
- exe34 2mo agoI wish they would have turned to Russia or Belarus to do this, it would have been a lot safer for them.
- Aerroon 2mo ago>Many years back when I used to do CS for WoW, a colleague of mine liked to say that the only reason some kids shit-talk the way they do is because it's online and if they tried it in person they'd get punched in the face. I've seen people have this opinion many times before and I don't get it. People talk shit in real life all the time and it's a much worse situation in real life because they might punch you in the face. This is why I don't mind online shit-talking, because it isn't going to escalate into a fight. In real life it might and imo the teens are more likely to escalate it especially if they are in a group.
- LaGrange 2mo agoYeah, that too. Like, being old enough to get my start largely in internet cafes means I actually _had_ in-person interactions with the type of person we're talking about - and they were _not_ nicer. Being kinda big I might even stand a chance against one - unless they had a knife, which they probably IME did - but there was always at least 5 of the "lonely lost boys," at least one carrying a baseball bat everywhere.
- LaGrange 2mo ago> As a parent now (but oldest is only 5), it's stories like this which make me determined remain aware of the kind of stuff my kids get up to and continually explain that actions have consequences, even if those consequences are seemingly as trivial as making someone else feel shit about themselves. Weird, somehow without significant parental surveillance or explicit explanation I somehow managed to _not_ do much of the awful stuff my acquaintances with much more engaged parents did. Must have been my autism, I guess.
- smallnix 2mo ago> The court heard the single child was given his first laptop at the age of 10 by his parents - carers who moved to London from Bangladesh. Ah.. I hate when stereotypes play out like this. It's always those single children.
- d-lowl 2mo ago>Jubair and Flowers who both have autism, gained access to the data by tricking a phone help desk worker. What does this have to do with anything in this article.
- voidUpdate 2mo agoAutism always makes your kids into sociopathic hackers, as we all know. They are also always top of their class in maths and bad at interacting with people /s
- rapidaneurism 2mo agoUnless it is to trick them into resetting a password over the phone that is
- inigyou 2mo agoHelps spread memes the BBC wants you to believe. Namely, autistic people bad. See, this is why I think the BBC needs to go.
- Steve16384 2mo agoWhy on earth would the BBC want or care for people to believe that? Are they in the pay of the anti-autism league? We're through the looking glass people!
- billygatesgruff 2mo agoI advise people to start looking into the case of the traitor and double agent Chris Packham
- inigyou 2mo agoI don't know but they've been spreading this kind of thing for a while. See also how they report on the middle east.
- kayo_20211030 2mo agoWhen I see this it makes me depressed. > gained access to the data by tricking a phone help desk worker. The whole edifice was built on a helpful, possibly overworked and possibly harassed help desk worker? The end result is that two kids end up in jail. It could have been so different, and better. What they did was wrong for sure, and has real-world consequences for those whose information was leaked. But, when I look at the contingencies that led to the outcome, it really does depress me. "all for the want of a nail"
- Aeolun 2mo agoLike, at some point we have to start considering teens natural disasters, and put it on the company to prevent something as banal as a password reset that can be requested on a phone from compromising their _entire_ fucking system. These kids aren’t most at fault here.
- VladVladikoff 2mo agoI don’t really have 16 hours to burn watching a live stream recording, but I kinda want to watch it for the lolz.
- Retr0id 2mo ago> Woolwich Crown Court heard both men [...] spent most of their time online unsupervised. Such an infantilising and surveillance-normalizing slant. Why is it worthy of mention that an adult spent time unsupervised? (Sure, one of them was 17 at the time, but that didn't stop them from waiting until he was 18 to charge him)
- erelong 2mo agodo you think there is a way to divert kids like this into some kind of useful programming / IT direction and if so what do you think would be the best way to handle this (like a group that takes black hat hackers to white hat hacker projects?) kids with like anti-social or aggressive tendencies plus maybe some tech "skillz"
- kortilla 2mo agoLike putting kids that get into fights into the military.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agothe military generally doesn't want those guys. maybe minor incidents but you don't want some idiot with impulse control issues handling a 240B machine gun. a little belligerent, sure, and sometimes judges will push da yout with minor court issues into the service, but the army ain't recruiting murders and serious gangbangers, and for good reason
- Sabinus 2mo ago>The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the rise of young hackers in the UK as one of the biggest threats to the nation's cyber security. Pity we can't do the same as the Russians and just point them at geopolitical adversaries. Russian viruses have been known to uninstall themselves if they detect Russian language configured on the device.
- parisisles 2mo ago(the french laundry)
- smith-kyle 2mo agoSad that they're being sentenced based on the impact of the response by TfL's IT team
- dofm 2mo agoBut that's part of the thing, isn't it? You don't get to argue that your crime wouldn't have been so bad if your victims weren't incompetent.
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoI mean you can’t put a building on fire and say you should not be sentenced for the whole building burning down because the impact of the response by the fire department (if they had been faster/better the fire would not caused so bad damages)
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoThe building owner has a degree of duty to mitigate loss. They can't go around opening doors and windows after the fire is started but before the fire department gets there and be all "whoops not my fault blame it on the guy who started the fire" regardless of how the fire started.
- roryirvine 2mo agoThe duty to mitigate loss is a concept in contract law, and its main use is in calculating damages (ie. you can't claim damages for a loss that you ought to have mitigated) It would definitely come into play if TfL were suing Jubair & Flowers, but it's not really relevant in a criminal situation like this.
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoI should have avoided those specific works because of the nitpickers. In any case you can't go out of your way to make the situation worse with a sort of sly understanding that because you're the victim the other person will wind up on the hook for it. They may wind up on the hook for it if you are a huge and exceptionally well connected entity and the other side is a nobody, but that's not how the system is supposed to work and it's not how it does work when the parties are on equal legal footing.
- antihero 2mo agoAh so a little more serious than gang rape, I guess. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cd0m38xndp3t https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cd0m38xndp3t
- throwaway888666 2mo agoBritain got talent I guess. They are teenagers. They don't belong in prison, they belong in an any cybercrime agency.
- willy_k 2mo agoIdk about Britain, but in the US that’s exactly where they’d end up after serving their sentence.
- cedws 2mo agoAnd what about the criminals who left these systems exposed?
- henrycoler 2mo ago[dead]