10 ms·
Wi-Fi–Hacking Neighbor From Hell Sentenced to 18 Years
- nowarninglabel 15y agoWell, for anyone still using WEP, this should be a wake up call. Not for ourselves, but which makes you reach out to relatives/friends and help them to move to a more secure wireless technology.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoCracking WEP on neighbors' router with malicious intent does not happen often. It's better to use more secure technology, but most of the time WEP is ok. Some people actually run wireless routers without encryption at all (and that was a blessing for me when I just moved into new place and was waiting for few days until cable company's technician showed up).
- andrewcooke 15y agothat's why i run an open wifi. because i have benefited from others doing the same in the past.
- ultrasaurus 15y agoI wish more routers came with a setting to share a small slice of your bandwidth on port 80 and 443 openly, with the real wifi access secured. Where I live, open wifi will be saturated by your neighbours' bittorrents quickly (we pay by the GB).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pyre 15y agoMost things come with WPA/WPA2 as default now. The only reason to be using WEP would be for compatibility with older devices (e.g. at least one previous version of the NintendoDS could only do WEP for Wifi).
- noonespecial 15y agoI'm looking at you, OS X Internet sharing.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- inoop 15y agoYears after it first came out, I still see loads of access points vulnerable to this ridiculous hack: http://www.kaisersblog.com/2008/07/hacking-thompson-speedtouch-routers-with-default-security-settings-crack-wepwpa-keys-within-minutes/ http://www.kaisersblog.com/2008/07/hacking-thompson-speedtou...
- m0nastic 15y agoAs I type this, my laptop (without an external antenna) sees: 8 Wireless Networks with no encryption at all, 15 WEP, 4 WPA Of the WPA networks, only one isn't using PSK (coincidentally it belongs to a satellite apartment to the Vietnamese embassy). I think we're still a ways away from seeing wireless routers configured in a secure fashion.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>Of the WPA networks, only one isn't using PSK (coincidentally it belongs to a satellite apartment to the Vietnamese embassy). Honey trap?
- SeoxyS 15y agoI'm very impressed that the victim's law firm employer gave him the benefit of the doubt, and hired a forensics firm to get to the bottom of it. In this day and age, expectations of loyalty from companies to their employees are very very low.
- geuis 15y agoIn part, this might be that people typically spend many years working their way up the ladder at a law firm. This requires building strong work and personal relationships with coworkers and a lot of trust. If a very, very good friend was in a similar situation and being accused of some very bad crimes, I like to think that I would give them the benefit of the doubt during the course of the investigation. Given condemning evidence, of course, that would change the nature of such a friendship in a negative manner.
- T_S_ 15y agoMe too. But perhaps it have harmed the cases he was working on. Never underestimate the incentives.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brown9-2 15y agoYou misread the article. The Kostolnik's filed a report against Ardolf for kissing the Kostolnik's 4-year-old son on the lips.
- huhtenberg 15y agoAh, right. My bad.
- Lairdkeir 15y agoI read the sentencing memo which comes across as a first attempt in a creative writing course: "Matt and Bethany Kostolnik moved into their dream home in August 2008. Located on a cul-de-sac in Blaine, the home provided room for their growing family; they had two children under five years old, and were expecting another child soon. On August 2, 2008, one day after moving into their new home, the dream became a nightmare." and so on. I was reading comments from others and a few were making light of the incident by stating "don't call the cops when someone returns your kid." I don't want to mitigate the hell they went through, but I'm still scratching my head b the mother's reaction. She didn't actually see the guy kiss her son; she heard it. Everywhere else I've read that he kissed the boy on the lips, but this isn't established. She then ran upstairs crying "We've moved next door to a paedophile!" If I had a visit from the police because of my neighbours who had just moved next door, I'd be freaking out. Just not to this extent..... www.tracesofevil.com
- pdenya 15y agoWhat the hell? "With Kostolnik’s permission, they installed a packet sniffer on his network to try and get to the bottom of the incidents." They installed a packet logger but didn't bother changing the encryption to something stronger than WEP!? Crazy. Edit: They likely already knew who was responsible since it had to be a neighbor but even if they didn't, the Secret Service had to show up investigating death threats to Biden for this log to be looked at. Hind site is 20/20 and all that but I would likely have handled this differently.
- pyre 15y agoI imagine they wanted to find out who was doing it.
- coderdude 15y agoWhat would be the point of the packet logger if they attempted to change the encryption? Wasn't the point to try and catch someone?
- elithrar 15y ago> They installed a packet logger but didn't bother changing the encryption to something stronger than WEP!? Crazy. They likely wanted to find the source of the intrusion and prosecute against it, not block it out completely. Changing to WPA2 w/ AES would have likely stopped the attacks, but it wouldn't have helped them find out who initiated them.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- biot 15y agoImagine if someone was sneaking through your basement window at night and you installed a video camera to see who is sneaking in and causing trouble. If you remove the window and replace it with solid concrete, what do you expect your video camera to record?
- pyre 15y ago> One of the manuals had Ardolf’s handwriting on it and > another had the unique identifying ID for the > Kostolniks’ router typed into it So were the manuals physical or digital? If they were physical, then why would he use a typewriter to enter their router MAC?
- sophacles 15y agoReally, your nit against a poor sentence is in the form of a false dilemma? What about: * An annotated and later printed PDF. * A home witten manual where notes and step-by-steps were put in a .doc (or similar) and printed out for later reference. * A single piece of paper printed and used as a bookmark, or taped into the cover of the book. And so on. Please at least try to think of alternatives which are more plausible than your random choice -- it comes off as less disingenuous.
- aashay 15y ago>“Over months and months, he inflicted unfathomable psychic damage, making the victims feel vulnerable in their own home, while avoiding detection.” So he's a hacker AND has psychic powers? Man oh man.
- geuis 15y agoObviously "psychic damage" refers to the mental trauma caused by the types of anti-social attacks that were being done to this family.
- noonespecial 15y agoYeah, pet peeve. Psychic != psychological. Irregardless, don't make me beg the question.
- Pooter 15y agoWhy is this very common and historically well attested use of the word psychic a pet peeve of yours?
- brianleb 15y agoNot that I want to be pedantic, but since we're being pedantic... psy·chic 1. of or pertaining to the human soul or mind; mental psy·cho·log·i·cal 2. pertaining to the mind or to mental phenomena as the subject matter of psychology. via our friend dictionary.com If sarcasm went by my head (and I think it may have, since you said irregardless), please ignore this post.
- noonespecial 15y agoYes, sarcasm, to both commenters. It was about shifting connotations diluting original meanings and not so much about pedantry. I stopped fighting "begs the question" years ago and simply accepted that it means something different now. We've lost psychic the same way (see great-grandparent post).
- electromagnetic 15y ago
- mostly_harmless 15y agoWhat is most shocking to me is that it took him 2 weeks to crack a WEP password... Was he putting in the characters by hand?!
- davis_m 15y agoIf the network was used as little as my parents is, and if this guy didn't have a network card capable of reinjecting packets, I can certainly see it taking a couple of weeks to get the number of IVs needed to crack a WEP key.
- inoop 15y agoSo let me get this straight, the guy hacked into his neighbour's WiFi and used it to mess with their MySpace page, e-mail coworkers, post a picture of 'pubescent girl having sex with two young boys' (I'd have gone for tubgirl, but okay), and threaten Joe Biden. And this gets him eighteen years in prison? In most countries you get eighteen years for murder. I'm sure the guy is a creepy douche, and what he did is clearly wrong, but these look like trumped up charges by a law firm that knows how to play ball. No-one will come out in defense of this man now that he has been publicly labeled a pedophile, even though I see no evidence of that in the article. If he really were into children, would they not have found a stash of pictures or videos when their confiscated his machine? Instead they found only the one he posted to myspace. I'm not sure how young the girl in the picture really was, but anyone looking to shock can easily get such material from say, 4chan. So really what we have here is a cracked WEP key, some e-mail harassment, a picture of a young girl having sex, and a death-threat to Joe Biden. Because of this, and probably because he tried to fuck with a lawyer, his life is now essentially over and young children get to spend the rest of their youths without a father. Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit excessive? Also, you're living in a pretty fucked up society when your neighbours call the cops because they saw you kissing your kid 'on the lips'. I'm pretty sure my entire family is a bunch of pedophiles by those standards. edit: totally got the wording wrong from the article. The guy kissed their boy, not his own. Mea culpa, must learn to read.
- pnathan 15y agofrom the article, it was the hacker kissing the kid on the lips, not the family...
- inoop 15y agoYes, and I'm saying that that does not make him a pedophile. I see fathers kissing their young kids on the lips all the time, maybe it's a European thing? Unless he's using tongue I don't see a reason to call the cops.
- malbs 15y agoSo you'd be fine with a complete stranger kissing your child on the lips?
- vectorpush 15y agoIn terms of justice, 18 years is kind of steep, but on a visceral level I just can't feel bad for a guy who tried to frame someone as a child pornographer. You're dunzo buddy.
- jrockway 15y agoThe lesson is clear: the next time you have a disagreement with your neighbor, get drunk and run him over with your car. You'll be out of prison sooner than if you hack his WiFi and send some sleeze-ball emails.
- tptacek 15y agoThe law explicitly distinguishes between criminal intent in the heat of passion and criminal intent fueled by prolonged and careful planning. So, yes.
- VladRussian 15y agoi think many would prefer to get their bones broken - several month in bed - than to get charged and, God forbid, be convicted of child porn - whole life down the drain.
- jrockway 15y agoIdeally, one is not convicted of crimes they don't commit. This case is a good example: the person that tried to frame his victim is now off to prison for 18 years.
- rokhayakebe 15y agowhole life down the drain I am sure some of these guys think they will just come out of jail and move out of the country. Bran new life right there.
- Joakal 15y agoSeems like disproportionate punishment for 18 years for constant harassment and first time offence (?). As a taxpayer, it seems economically cheaper to rehabilitate him for the non-violent offences and get him contributing back to the economy rather than spending money incarnating him. IANAP (I am not a participant) beyond the article. I don't know the full case details to warrant the punishment.
- tptacek 15y agoIt was the first time he was convicted of an offense, but there was (a) evidence of prior offenses turned up by the investigation into this one, and (b) every indication that the offender was not only remorseless, but saw his own actions as justified by the persecution he underwent for accosting his neighbor's 4 year old son. There was, in other words, a very credible case to be made that the offender was destined to re-offend.
- Tomis 15y agoSo basically the American justice system admits that it is incapable of rehabilitation and that its only purpose is punishing and/or isolating offenders from society. Got it.
- laughinghan 15y agoCould someone clarify a technical issue for me? I thought hacking WEP grants you access to the internet via that Wi-Fi network, which explains how he created a MySpace page that traced back to their IP address, but how would he be able to send emails from the lawyer's email account? Even within the poorly encrypted Wi-Fi network, the lawyer was using Yahoo Mail which surely uses HTTPS, so how did the neighbor get into the lawyer's email account? Unless he used a custom mail client to spoof the From field of the email, in which case the email should be easily provably not sent via Yahoo Mail's servers.
- lotharbot 15y agoHacking WEP grants you access to that Wi-Fi network. This means you can directly attack the target system. Exploits that allow arbitrary code execution are revealed from time to time. If the guy gets behind on security updates, use a known exploit to install a keylogger, and you now have access to the guy's email and other accounts (from his IP address and everything!)
- davis_m 15y agoThe attacker more than likely just sniffed the credentials over the air. With the titles of the "hacking manuals" this guy didn't sound like a very sophisticated attacker. This would have been before the large movement to HTTPS for logins, and a Yahoo login would have been easy to sniff. Even with HTTPS, SSLStrip, Ettercap, and arpspoof makes short work of HTTPS logins.
- laughinghan 15y agoShort work? As in, with a little Googling of these kinds of tools, anyone could be sniffing anyone else's HTTPS logins on a gigantic, campus-wide Wi-Fi network?
- davis_m 15y agoYahoo Mail didn't implement HTTPS until after Firesheep came out. With the length of time that these sorts of trials take, I imagine that Yahoo was still transmitting usernames and passwords over HTTP in cleartext when this all happened.
- sgoranson 15y ago"In the data surrounding the threatening traffic, they found traffic containing Ardolf’s name and Comcast account." What do you suppose this means? Did his decide to check his personal email while on his neighbor's wifi?
- abalashov 15y agoMy guess is that maybe he was bright enough to crack the WEP but not bright enough to send the e-mail through the victim's ISP's SMTP relay, but instead sent it through his own (Comcast's), possibly authenticated with his own username and password, if Comcast does user authentication for SMTP instead of just trusting all of their customer subnets blanketly.
- inoop 15y agoMaybe his e-mail client decided to check for new mail while he was still connected to his neighbour's WiFi?
- dkarl 15y agoInteresting how many people's first thoughts go to fairness to the defendant, despite the seriousness of his crimes and the utter certainty that he committed them. Apparently, because of the means he used, many folks here find it easier to identify with him than with his victims. It reminds me of the discussions of local bicycle-car accidents I read when I was reading through cycling forums looking for commuting tips years ago. You could put Pol Pot on a bicycle, and suddenly people would see things from his perspective. Anyway, I urge people to consider that anxieties about being unfairly treated and fantasies about satisfying computer-based acts of retribution are pretty common and have NOTHING to do with this guy's very rare and very dangerous ability to commit such cruelty, not once on an impulse, not to one family, but to multiple victims over long periods of time. If he was a little less clever and/or had a little bit more physical bravery, he might have physically tortured and killed people instead of just trying to ruin their lives.
- inoop 15y agoI wholly agree the guy's a total dick and probably has some serious mental issues, but come on, just because you troll your neighbours by hacking their WiFi doesn't mean you're capable of torture and murder. What this guy did is no different from trying to destroy someone professionally by spreading lies and rumours in more conventional ways, as has been done in most corporations pretty much ever since they were invented.
- three14 15y ago"What this guy did is no different from trying to destroy someone... in more conventional ways" is exactly the point. If someone did exactly the same things in conventional ways, he should still get the same sentence, and he probably would have.
- inoop 15y ago> If someone did exactly the same things in conventional ways, he should still get the same sentence, and he probably would have. Huh? I never said anything to the contrary?
- leon_ 15y agowow, I'm from europe and 18 years seem to me for what he did just cruel. even 3 years would be hard. that's why I wouldn't want to live in the US. the criminal system is out of control. if you "fuck up" a little bit or they just get the wrong guy there's a chance you will spend a big part of your life behind bars (or worse).
- mike-cardwell 15y agoI'm from Europe and 18 years seems fair. His intention was to falsely brand somebody else a paedophile for life, have them imprisoned, lose their job, their reputation, and likely their family. The guy is scum, and deserves to be locked away for a lot longer than the 3 years you think would be hard.
- kahawe 15y agoI am from Europe and it seems fair for the reasons listed by the court. Read the actual PDF and their reasoning; it is very conclusive and clear. The part that weighs so heavy is the planning, the full intent and showing absolutely no remorse to the court. The hacking was just a means to an end. He got sentenced for willingly, cold bloodedly and with full intent trying to destroy his neighbor's life. This would not have gone down any different in the EU. And darn am I sick of fellow Europeans flinging poo towards the USA every chance they get and 99% of them haven't ever actually worked or lived there.
- leon_ 15y ago> This would not have gone down any different in the EU. I dare to bet no EU country would have sentenced someone to 18 years for what he did.
- Tomis 15y agoI'm from Europe and I agree with you.
- pjeide 15y agoTRWTF: It took him 2 weeks to crack the WEP..