Comcast hackers charged
Although it seems that few hackers are caught and brought to trial, the members of the Kryogeniks hacker “gang” have been charged with a Website hacking stunt that was costly to Comcast.
The Comcast exploit was not all that complicated, but it is said to have cost the company more than $100,000. More importantly, perhaps, the unfolding case shed some light on the motivation of hackers. The exploit engineered by the three (Christopher Allen Lewis (EBK), James Robert Black (Defiant), and Michael Paul Lebel (Slacker)) hijacked the cable giant’s home page and Web mail service for more than five hours and allegedly cost the company over $128,000.
All it took was a couple of phone calls and an email sent to a Web registrar from a hacked Comcast email account, and the three were able to redirect the Comcast home page to a basic page reading “KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” The prank did not start out to go even that far, according to a CNN story.
The three had originally planned to simply change the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to Defiant’s e-mail address, using a phony street address built of rough language elements. The hackers then contacted the Comcast tech contact to brag about what they had done and the contact did not believe them. This angered the three, and they went back into the site and did the further damage for which they have now been charged.
Perhaps the three were terminally bored.This sort of hacking is pointless, at any rate, and so is the attitude that makes it likely. It is a “look at me, look at me” sort of crime, a vandalism sometimes more public than secretly keying someone’s car, but taking the same sort of mentality. Doing damage just because you can is a crime of the small mind, regardless of the arena in which the damage is inflicted.
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