Category: Crime and Security

A 19-year-old Minnesota resident was sentenced in a US District Court today to 18 months in prison and an additional 10 months of community service for releasing a variant of the Blaster worm in 2003. Jeffrey Lee Parson had originally pleaded innocent to the charges, but last summer had a change of heart and pleaded… Read more →

Recent amendments to the United States Code are about to be tested by prosecutors in the District of Columbia, who have charged one Robert Murphy with 26 counts of using a telecommunications device ‘to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass’. The facts of the case reflect an increasingly common experience for ex-partners and employees: the accused… Read more →

This thread in Adobe’s Photoshop Users forum details a rather unusual feature that debuted with the release of the latest incarnation of popular image-editing software Photoshop. The latest version uses an image-analysis algorithm to detect the presence of an image of United States or European Union currency, and disables access to the file. The motivation… Read more →

A jury in the Southwalk Crown Court, London, has acquitted a teenager of various cyber crimes after his counsel successfully used the ‘Trojan Horse’ defense. Aaron Caffrey, aged 19, was charged with launching a denial of service (DoS) attack from his personal computer against a mainframe computer owned by the Port of Houston in Texas,… Read more →

According to The Age, two men were successful in a cunning theft of several million dollars worth of high-tech mainframe computers from the cargo and intelligence centre of Sydney International Airport. Authorities are more concerned about the use to which data contained on the servers will be put than the loss of the equipment (they… Read more →

A British Court has acquitted Julian Green, an individual accused of possessing child pornography when police siezed his computer in October 2002. This month, Mr. Green was acquitted in Exeter Crown Court after arguing that the material had been gathered without his knowledge by a rogue program created by hackers — a so-called Trojan horse… Read more →

Recent days have seen the rapid spread of a new internet worm, which seems to have taken many by surprise and is continuing to infect users with unprecedented rapidity. It goes by several names – MSBlast, W32.Blaster, Lovsan – and has a relatively mild (but annoying) payload: it uses a DCOM RPC exploit to shutdown… Read more →