SWAT Falls for Blind Hacker's Games

[phernandez]

Teenage Hacker Is Blind, Brash and in the Crosshairs of the FBI

Just came across this great profile on a blind, underaged Caller ID spoofer and the FBI's efforts to put and end to his SWAT-happy ways.

Great read, but this is the kicker...

The holes he's exploiting are in large part the same ones a previous generation of phreaks relied on. He's running variations of the same old scams. Daniels notices this as well. "He is nasty as the day is long because he knows a few tricks from the old days," he says.

It's as though the phone companies -- which enjoy notoriously close relations with the feds -- are so adept at getting their hackers arrested that they're little motivated to spend money securing their sprawling infrastructures. If malicious phone phreaks were the only threat to telecom customers, that might be a sound strategy. But as the pretexting scandals of 2006 showed, the same vulnerabilities make things easy for snoops and criminals of all stripes, and a report released this week tallying identity theft complaints ranks AT&T and Sprint customers as the second and third most victimized, respectively.

Sad that in this day and age... Oh well, the telecoms have some FISA drama to keep them busy.

[thehorse13]

Not surprising. I recall when a security engineer fresh out of college remarked, "...all these new crimes on the Internet."

Reality is that people are commiting the same exact crimes they have been for centuries. The Internet, or otherwise, just provides a new medium to commit the same crimes over and over.

Remember that catchy "social engineering" term from 30+ years ago? Interesting how it's the main vector for malware infections today.

As for fixing this crap, don't hold your breath. Many places use the fight club formula when approaching risk. If it's cheaper not to fix it, it won't be fixed. A+B=C.

--TH13

[gore]

Lol yea, that's like when they say a Redbox doesn't work anymore because they "fixed it" which is crap. Most pay phones just need a nickel dropped in them and then the mouth piece is un-muted and ready for a tone.

I doubt I'm giving away secrets with that so I decided to respond with it.

Wanna screw up your Comcast cable box? All you need is the remote they supply with it!

Hit power and ... OK I'll be nice but needless to say you can view the diagnostic app they use to check your cable yourself with TWO buttons on the remote. The boxes IP also shows up

And if you know the right key combo, you can unblock pay channels like pron too without it showing up on the bill.

I won't go into that since I found it by accident and don't use it. Hell, I STILL have two free payperviews from Comcast because their service has gone down on the TV so many times. I didn't even have to pay the first bill, they have credited the whole thing as an apology.

And then the art of finger hacking cell phones. My T-Mobile phone form Nokia doesn't display their message anymore, it says "GORE" when you turn it on.

Again, using nothing more than the phone and the buttons on it, you can re-program it in about 4 key punches.

Nokia seems to be REALLY good for that as does LG. The "you should only know how to do this if you're a shop owner" is generally pressing a few keys and hitting send.

If you're REALLY interested in custom messages and screens on your phone there should be something online about it, but it's really not hard. However each phone company who makes their own phones DOES have their own way of doing it.

I know the really old brick phones would let you re-program them by hitting something like 0099SEND# or something.

By the way, there generally isn't an option for free calls so if that's all you want it's really not worth the effort.

I could go on about how to make someone's minutes run over but that's just rude, and illegal. And no, I don't do that. Cell phones are so cheap now there really isn't a valid reason to do it.

[westin]

heh, I used to work at a cell phone place... there are a ton of codes readily available to anyone wanting to look... my favorite was always the nokia long programming something like *3001#12345# ... like gore said, it doesn't give you ability to make free calls, but you can get some interesting info on the phone... as far as I know, there is nothing illegal about getting into the programming for the phone.