New Zealand teenager's exploit prove hacking advances

04/03/2008 Written by From the world

Lon­don, Eng­land, 3^rd March 2008 – News that an 18-​year-​old New Zealand teenager allegedly at the cen­tre of an inter­na­tional cyber­crime net­work has been charged with var­i­ous hack­ing crimes on Fri­day is proof that advances in hack­ing tech­niques are mov­ing at an aston­ish­ing speed and that mil­lions of users don’t have ade­quate pro­tec­tion against the lat­est threats, says Tier-3’s Geoff Sweeney.

The CTO with the behav­ioural analy­sis soft­ware spe­cial­ist added that news that Own Thor Walker now faces up to ten years in prison if found guilty illus­trates the seri­ous­ness of his alleged actions.

“The 18-​year-​old is thought to have writ­ten the soft­ware used to hack into 1.3 mil­lion com­put­ers and even brought down the com­puter sys­tem at a major US uni­ver­sity,” said Sweeney.

Uncon­firmed reports sug­gest that Walker’s net­work had allegedly skimmed about 10 mil­lion pounds in total from the vic­tims’ bank accounts, as well as crash­ing a sup­posed robust server at Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia in 2006,” he added.

Accord­ing to Sweeney, if true, then Walker would have been just 16 years old at the time of these events which is evi­dence that the oppor­tu­nity to con­struct and use soft­ware that can com­pro­mise so many machines is within the reach of almost any­one who has the skills.

“Regard­less of whether he is guilty or not, or who­ever com­mit­ted these crimes, the mes­sage has once again been repeated - crim­i­nal hack­ing has moved into a new phase, and com­pa­nies need to pro­tect their IT resources with secu­rity sys­tems that reflect these changes,” he said.

For more on the alleged Kiwi hacker’s exploits:

http://​tinyurl​.com/​y​q76bk

For more on Tier-​3:

http://​www​.tier​-​3​.com

ABOUT TIER–3

Tier-​3, with head­quar­ters in Syd­ney, is the inven­tor of Behav­ioural Anom­aly Detec­tion (BAD) tech­nol­ogy which is the cor­ner­stone of the HUNTS­MAN Threat Man­age­ment Sys­tem. HUNTS­MAN enables enter­prises to scale secu­rity man­age­ment while, at the same time, improv­ing its effec­tive­ness by offer­ing for the first time, insight into enter­prise ICT infra­struc­ture and real-​time risk-​based threat man­age­ment. Tier-​3s sig­nif­i­cant cus­tomer base includes gov­ern­ment, finan­cial insti­tu­tions, major cor­po­ra­tions, and organ­i­sa­tions in the crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture and intel­li­gence areas around the world. www​.tier​-​3​.com

Media Con­tact:

Neil Stinch­combe

Eskenzi PR Ltd.

++44(0)20 7183 2833

neil@​eskenzipr.​com