When a hacking sting goes wrong..

By Marisa Taylor
Wall Street Journal

A sting operation led by Australian federal police against a well-known hacking ring ended in embarrassment after the police computer system was hacked by the very cybercriminals they’d aimed to wipe out, according the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aussie police reported on the TV show Four Corners that they had infiltrated the hacking forum r00t-you.org, which has about 5,000 members, by tracking hackers logging in to the site and then raiding the Melbourne home of the site’s administrator. Police had logged into the r00t-you.org forum as the administrator to gather information about other cybercriminals, and told the TV program that they had gained access “fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration.”

What the police didn’t realize, though, was that they had failed to set a password on their own database application. The hackers allegedly grew suspicious after the police posted a message on the forum saying that the hacking forum was under surveillance, so they broke into the federal system and accessed police IP addresses and other police evidence, the Herald reports.

One of the cyber criminals then poked fun at the police on the Web site pastebin.com, ridiculing them for using Windows to run the police server, and also posting screen shots of fake IDs and stolen credit card numbers to prove he or she had accessed the federal police’s server. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” the hacker wrote, upon discovering that the police had “left the MYSQL password blank,” and boasted, “all of this [hacking] had been done within 30-40 minutes. Could of been faster if I didn’t stop to laugh so much.”

The Australian police, on the other hand, say that the items posted by the hackers are from a separate police server that is used for these types of investigations, and that “no information or files exist that have, or could have, been compromised.”

The counter-hacking incident is indicative of the rise in frequency and severity of cyber crimes. Despite the Obama administration’s pledge to overhaul cyber security and eventually fill the new position of “cyber czar,” attacks both small and large have persisted.

On Monday, for example, federal prosecutors indicted one American and two Russians believed to have masterminded the largest hacking scheme in U.S. history, in which the three poached more than 40 million credit card numbers from TJX Cos., swindling the company of an estimated $200 million. And a U.S. non-profit group just reported that cyber crime techniques may even become standard tools of war, using the example that Russian hackers assumed American identities and software tools to attack Georgian government Web sites during a five-day war between the two countries last year.

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The hackers allegedly grew suspicious after the police posted a message on the forum saying that the hacking forum was under surveillance

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huh? So the plan of the police sting included posting a message warning them they are being watched? . . .

Silly cop's, stick to walking the beat.

I don't understand what the Obama administration has to do with this though, it seems it was an Aussie investigation. Or was it a poorly written article about an international investigation?

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Originally Posted by demotivater

Silly cop's, stick to walking the beat.

I don't understand what the Obama administration has to do with this though, it seems it was an Aussie investigation. Or was it a poorly written article about an international investigation?

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Its the WSJ, they don't like Democrats