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Accidentally including your exact location in message taunting the police is failing about as hard as possible without actually qualifying for a Darwin Award.
An alleged member of Anonymous has been tracked down after he posted a picture of his scantily clad girlfriend in an image bragging about his hacking exploits. Higinio O. Ochoa III from Texas has been charged hacking into the websites of at least four US law enforcement agencies before, in one case at least, posting personal …
It occurs to me that they might have a large database of less than anonymous people that they are monitoring through more sophisticated means they don't wish to make public, and they just wait until one of them makes a mistake like this to grab them with some evidence they are happy to make public in the law courts.
As conspiracy theories go, that's not too far fetched. On the other hand, having hung out with people who for one reason or another want to stay anonymous, I'm well aware of just how many ways there are to slip up, especially if you have a consistent pseudonym. And given we're dealing with the kind of person who can't spell "come at me" or "bitches" correctly I have no particular reason to think the feds needed extra help tracking him down.
Good one. Now that you've mastered sarcasm, try mastering the caps lock key. Then read the story again and realise the guy lives in Texas and has a "girlfriend" in Sydney. Then look up the difference between "their" and "there". Then you're ready to move on to punctuation, such as the apostrophe, comma and question mark.
Then, with luck and a lot of concentration, we can get you wearing big boy pants and stop you having those accidents.
Can't quite beat the expertise of the "hacker" that takes the photos with a device known to add the GPS coordinates and even tells you on screen it's using the GPS. Then you edit it in your no doubt cracked version of photoshop, as I doubt you spunked a grand on software, before saving it without minimising or checking what metadata has been embedded and posting it as a two finger salute to law enforcement. Geez there's some fucking stupid people out there.
At first I thought he must be innocent seeing as he had a girlfriend! Then I realised he was in Texas and she was in Melbourne, Australia - cyber-girlfriend! The law of cyberdorks and natural unselection is still maintained. I'm guessing the "ample" bit means she was a fat cyber-girlfriend too?
ls | xargs jhead -purejpg
or
find ./folder_of_images -name '*.jpg' | xargs mogrify -strip
I'm sure there are ways to do the same in windows, but I cannot be bothered to look. I 'clean' any images that I post to the web regardless if they're personal or not. It's a bunch of personal information that other people would rarely need, and if you're kicking the law enforcement lion in the balls, it will come back to bite you.
Right-click -> Properties -> Details -> Remove Properties and Personal Information.
Or the easier thing to do is to not try and hack the very people that would be kicking down your door. Of course the kiddies of 4chan have never been accused of having too much common sense.
"A review of log files from the Texas DPS website revealed that it had been compromised on February 8 ... utilising a SQL injection vulnerability ..."
The Texas Department of Public Safety can't even look after their own safety. How long have SQL injection vulnerabilities been widely known about, understood and fix measures been available?
Yes, embarrassing, but not surprising. The bar is actually quite low.
Whilst most government sites are probably no less secure than the average, there are a lot of them. (Governments are fairly large sprawling entities and every country has one.) It is inevitable that some will be wide open. If you go to a large multi-storey carpark on a Saturday morning and systematically try *every* car, I'm sure you will find that some of them are unlocked. (*) The only difference with web-sites is that the web-site search can be automated and probably isn't covered by the cyber equivalent of CCTV.
(* At least, you would have done in years gone by. I think at least some modern cars have a preference for automatically locking themselves if the key(s) drift too far away. Human nature remains as fallible as ever, but the common failure mode has been identified and engineered away. If only there was such a thing for SQL injections.)
I know you can usually turn the option off which stores location information in your pictures. However, I noticed that my Winphone has a second option: it can automatically remove said location info again as soon as you put a picture online (social media, skydrive, etc.).
As such this leaves me wondering if the other platforms don't have an option such as this ?
Are you sure it works?
Or does it re-encode the data and hide it in the picture itself while sending a message to the MIBs that you are trying to hide your location/personal info?
Its a closed source app, you can't check the code to be sure.
Mines the one with the foil lining and matching hat.
Or it didn't happen, as the saying goes.
Sorry for 2 posts quickly after another; but if the fellow geeks want to actually see the picture themselves they should check out this article (link) on the Daily Mail website.
C'mon El Reg, why didn't you post this important piece of evidence as well? ;-)
TBH, it's a great story - dumb hax0r gets caught due to his own taunting message of his cyber-gf's boobs. It sounds like something more out of a TV show, proof I suppose that life is often stranger/funnier than fiction. I bet the rest of the CabinCr3w skiddies are wetting themselves waiting for Higinio to roll over on them.
Isn't this all a bit too easy?
Knowing how /b/tards / anon LIKE to get people vanned (This is the art of getting random people / people who've annoyed them) arrested for various crimes, doesn't all of this seem a bit too easy?
I dunno, maybe he IS that dumb, or maybe hes just another fall guy.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Anonymous" may once have been a homogenous band of high-minded hacktivist heroes working selflessly for the greater good. But sadly, that ship has sailed.
WORLD WAR WEB ADVISORY #7: ANONYMOUS HAS BEEN OCCUPIED
"Anonymous" has been occupied. And no longer just by web warriors laying waste to websites of the wicked, computer wizards worming their way into the iPhones of "Internet Security" frauds, or digital do-gooders doxing Congressional dolts and other corporate-controlled degenerates.
Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is no longer a band. Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is now just a brand. Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is the boogeyman. What "Al Qaida Terrorism" did for the corporate cartel controlling America's Military Industrial Complex, "Anonymous Hacktivism" will do for that same corporate cartel's Terrorism Industrial Complex, the vastness and taxpayer cost of which - if ever disclosed - would certainly defy comprehension:
http://tinyurl.com/2e8cd5c
http://tinyurl.com/6slmeg7
And like "Al Qaida Terrorist", "Anonymous Hacktivist" is well on its way to becoming synonymous with "stateless enemy", a label we've seen loosely and liberally applied to any and all willing to fight back against the global corporate fascist perpetual war-for-profit machine when it illegally crosses sovereign borders to immorally massacre millions of their innocent wives and mothers, sisters and brothers, and others whose only crime was refusing to become another corporate fascist puppet by compromising their principles in exchange for power or personal gain. And once that label is applied, given AUMF 2001 and now NDAA 2012, the fascist puppet regime in Washington DC can use whatever measures it deems necessary to make the troublemaker disappear - including arresting and detaining indefinitely without charge or trial an unarmed American citizen on American soil:
http://tinyurl.com/7gjczmu
http://tinyurl.com/7ybcu7m
Also sobering is the ease with which sovereign governments, corporate conglomerates and the global elite who control them can now conduct false flag cyber-ops to advance their agendas and blame them on the brave band of brothers and sisters behind all those virtual Fawkesian masks. Consider, for example: When the FBI penetrated Lulz Security, was their aim merely to probe the hackers, or to impact their agenda? Were all of the federal websites hit in recent weeks hacked by democracy-minded dissidents, or were some of them targeted by Shangdong saboteurs from one of China's six TRBs (technical reconnaissance bureaus)? And what was the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) recruiting hackers for, if not to hack?
http://tinyurl.com/77x4qg6
http://tinyurl.com/4xwe4zp
http://tinyurl.com/2e4epbe
http://tinyurl.com/7o6gaz3
Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer for Finnish online security company F-Secure, answers with this:
"Anonymous is like an amoeba, it's got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding - they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida. Its just a brand nowadays, nothing else. It's run the same, so that, like al-Qaida, anyone can credit an attack to Anonymous and no one's there to say otherwise."
http://tinyurl.com/6p9owk6
Three strikes and you're out: this bonzo has (1) Twitter counting against him and (2) Facebook making things even worse; all that's needed now is to see if he's in Google Plus. Morons don't rule the world. They only tell each other they do. (Please Like / please Twitter / please Share.)