All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

SEARCH
Voices

Voices

The Voices Feed

from other Web sites

Australian Hacking Sting Backfires

August 19, 2009
by Marisa Taylor
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Marisa Taylor

A sting operation led by Australian federal police against a well-known hacking ring ended in embarrassment after the police computer system was hacked by the very cybercriminals they’d aimed to wipe out, according the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aussie police reported on the TV show Four Corners that they had infiltrated the hacking forum r00t-you.org, which has about 5,000 members, by tracking hackers logging in to the site and then raiding the Melbourne home of the site’s administrator. Police had logged into the r00t-you.org forum as the administrator to gather information about other cybercriminals, and told the TV program that they had gained access “fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration.”

What the police didn’t realize, though, was that they had failed to set a password on their own database application.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Tagged: Internet, digital, frontpage, software, , , , , , , , , , , | permalink
« Previous Post
Next Post »

Featured Voices Posts

Featured Video

View All Jobs | Post a Job Job Listings

A sponsored service from SimplyHired

Voices Posts by Date

About Voices

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do: Read more »

About the Site

Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

Read more »