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Spanish Hacker Heads For Hoosegow
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-02-07
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Sometimes getting even isn't such a good idea. Santiago Garrido, 26, decided a "denial of service" worm was the way to go when he got booted from the "Hispano" IRC chat room.
The offense happened back in 2003 and the attacks created problems for roughly three million chatters using the Wanadoo, ONO, Lleida Net and other ISP services. This accounted for a full third of Spain's Internet users at the time.
In addition to the prison term, Garrido, aka "Ronnie" aka "Mike25" could also face a steep €1.4 million fine. He should've followed the chat room rules. If he had, he wouldn't be facing these problems.
"Many times hackers use DDoS techniques to try and blackmail the website being attacked. On this occasion, it seems the hacker was so furious about being thrown out of a chat room that he resorted to a criminal act to wreak his revenge, and affected millions of Internet users," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Hackers engaged in these kind of activities are guilty of a serious crime, and should be punished accordingly. The Spanish Civil Guard should be congratulated for seeing this case through to its conclusion."
Sophos added some statistics:
Zombie computers can be used by criminal hackers to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, spread spam messages or to steal confidential information. SophosLabs estimates that more than 60 percent of all spam today originates from zombie computers. In May 2005, the Sober-Q Trojan horse and Sober-N worm worked in tandem to infect and hijack computers around the world, programming them to spew out German nationalistic spam during an election.
As spammers become more aggressive, collaborating with virus writers to create armies of zombie computers, legitimate organizations with hijacked computers are being identified as a source of spam. This not only harms the organization's reputation, but can also cause the company's email to be blocked by others.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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