“Lori Drew decided to humiliate a child. The only way she could harm this pretty little girl was with a computer. She chose to use a computer to hurt a little girl, and for four weeks she enjoyed it.” U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien, chief federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, during closing arguments.

A federal jury here issued what legal experts said was the country’s first cyberbullying verdict Wednesday, convicting a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager, who later committed suicide.

The jury deadlocked on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori Drew, 49, and the judge, George H. Wu of Federal District Court, declared a mistrial on that charge. (more)

An American woman, accused of driving a teenage girl to suicide by bullying her on MySpace, has been cleared of one of the most serious charges against her.

Lori Drew, 49, was found not guilty of accessing a computer without authorisation to inflict emotional distress.

The jury failed to reach a verdict on another conspiracy charge.

She was convicted on three minor counts of violating the website’s terms and conditions.

Drew, from Missouri, was accused of posing as a boy on MySpace to befriend 13-year-old Megan Meier, who hanged herself after their virtual relationship ended.

The court in Los Angeles heard that Lori Drew was aware Megan suffered from depression and was emotionally fragile.

Drew was charged with violating MySpace’s terms of use, which ban users from assuming false identities and harassing other members.

The case is the first in the US relating to cyber-bullying.

Lori Drew could receive up to three years in prison when she is sentenced.

She would have faced a maximum 20 years if convicted of the more serious felony charges.

He said he would do it. And he did. Abraham K. Biggs, a 19-year-old Florida bodybuilder, took some sleeping pills on live webcam, lay down and went to sleep. Just like he said he would.

But the teenager never intended to wake up. And he didn’t.

While others watched. And others turned away. And still others encouraged and taunted him.

Abraham K. Biggs, known online as “CandyJunkie” and “Mr. Biggs,” told fellow users in an online bodybuilding forum on Justin.tv – a lifecasting website, where users share via webcam their everyday lives – that he would be committing suicide and invited them to tune in.

Some users saw Biggs take what looked like sleeping pills, lay down on his bed with his back to the camera, and stop moving. After a few hours, some worried that he may have actually went through with his threat because of the stillness of his body. Authorities were notified and police entered the room — live on webcam. After checking for a pulse, they covered the webcam.

Abraham K. Biggs has been reportedly pronounced dead by a Broward Country medical examiner.

Biggs posted on MySpace that he was going to commit suicide three days before he actually went through with it. A post from a week before related how he had closed a chapter in his life and was apologetic to friends for his recent behavior.

It is alleged that some users have deleted their posts from the forum. In light of the ongoing court case involving the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier as a result of alleged cyberbullying from neighbor Lori Drew, users fear that they may in some way be held responsible are well grounded.

Testimony in the Meier case began Wednesday (November 19) in Los Angeles, although the suicide took place in Missouri. The alleged bullying took place on MySpace, where 49-year-old Lori Drew created the MySpace account of “Josh Evans” to allegedly ridicule and harass teenager Megan Meier. MySpace’s corporate offices are located in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — Slumping forward miserably in the witness box, in barely audible tones, a young woman told a federal jury here on Thursday that she had posed as a teenage boy in a series of e-mail messages to a 13-year-old girl that ended in the girl’s expressing suicidal thoughts and hanging herself.

“You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over,” the woman, Ashley Grills, said the 13-year-old girl, Megan Meier, wrote before taking her own life.

Testifying under an immunity agreement with federal prosecutors, Ms. Grills, 20, described how she came up with the idea to create a fake MySpace account with the identity of a cute teenage boy. The goal, she said, was to draw in Megan and learn about her and things she might have been saying about the teenage daughter of Ms. Grills’s friend and employer, Lori Drew.

Ms. Drew, who lives in a suburb of St. Louis and was a neighbor of the Meiers, is charged with conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.

Legal experts believe the trial is an unprecedented use of computer fraud statutes to prosecute a case involving how people use a social networking site. Thomas O’Brien, the United States attorney here, asserted jurisdiction over a matter that local prosecutors in Missouri chose not to pursue — successfully arguing that he had jurisdiction because MySpace is based in Los Angeles, where its servers are housed.

In her testimony on the second day of Ms. Drew’s trial, Ms. Grills described how Ms. Drew had become angry with Megan for “spreading lies” about Ms. Drew’s daughter Sarah, and was eager to “expose” her. Ms. Grills, who worked at the Drew home, said she hatched the idea of creating a phony MySpace account, under the name Josh Evans, to communicate with Megan.

The original idea, Ms. Grills said, was to lure Megan to make nasty remarks about Sarah, which she and Ms. Drew would then present to Megan’s mother. But the idea morphed into other methods of humiliating the girl — devised by Ms. Drew, she said.

Ms. Grills said that she had expressed trepidation about creating a fake account, but that Ms. Drew had told her “that it was fine and that people do it all the time.” She added, “She was like a second mother to me, and I didn’t think she would do anything to get me in trouble.”

Things went awry, Ms. Grills said, after she sent an e-mail message with Ms. Drew’s blessing that said, “The world would be a better place without you.” It was an attempt, she said, to get Megan to stop communicating with the made-up Josh so the ruse could end.

Megan’s response, the message about suicide, had never been revealed by Ms. Grills until this week. Shortly after sending the message, Megan hanged herself on Oct. 16, 2006.

“It was something I didn’t want to remember,” said Ms. Grills, who said she had been hospitalized for depression after the suicide. “I pushed it out of my mind.”

As Ms. Grills told her story, Megan’s father, Ronald Meier, listened from the front row of the courtroom, rocking slightly and furiously dabbing at his eyes.

Ms. Drew’s defense lawyer, Dean Steward, carefully tried to unravel the credibility of Ms. Grills and others witnesses, including Megan’s mother, Christina Meier, whose testimony continued from Wednesday.

“Don’t you kind of have to say stuff they want to hear?” he said to Ms. Grills, motioning to prosecutors in a reference to her immunity agreement.

Mr. Steward suggested that Ms. Meier ought to have known better than to leave her daughter alone in her room after a nasty exchange of e-mail banter left the girl distraught. He said the antidepressant drugs her daughter had been taking were known to cause suicidal thoughts in teenagers.

“You let her run upstairs to the room alone,” Mr. Steward said to Ms. Meier.

The trial has also included testimony about the fallout for Ms. Drew after the case became public. A hairdresser testified about the irate phone calls her salon received for continuing to tend to the hair care of Ms. Drew, and an interior designer detailed both how she sold Ms. Drew blinds to block the hostile approaches of neighbors, while being hectored herself for continuing to advertise her business in a coupon book distributed by Ms. Drew.

Mr. O’Brien, the United States attorney, made the highly unusual choice to prosecute the case himself, punctuating his personal interest in the matter.

Should he succeed in convicting Ms. Drew, the case, while derided by critics as an overreach, would almost certainly be a game changer in the still-evolving world of social networking.

By essentially equating the violation of usage agreements with computer hacking into a computer, a guilty verdict in this case could have widespread implications for future prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, said Matthew Levine, a former federal prosecutor. Each of the three counts against Ms. Drew carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Los Angeles — A federal prosecutor says a Missouri mother hatched a plot with her daughter and an employee to stage an Internet hoax to prey on a 13-year-old girl who later committed suicide.

U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien has told jurors during opening statements Wednesday that 49-year-old Lori Drew helped create a false identity account on the social networking site MySpace.

Drew is accused of harassing her young neighbor, Megan Meier, with cruel messages in what prosecutors say is the nation’s first cyber-bullying case.

Meier hanged herself in 2006 after allegedly receiving a message saying the world would be better off without her.

Drew has pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing computers without authorization. Each count carries a potential sentence of five years in prison.

Last week, the judge in the MySpace suicide case had some concerns over whether the suicide of a 13 year-old girl was relevant to the crime charged. On Friday, U.S. District Judge George Wu apparently got past those concerns. He ruled that prosecutors can use evidence of the suicide in its case against Lori Drew. The trial is set to begin tomorrow.

Judge George Wu, Jan. 19, 2006, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Los Angeles Times, Robert Gauthier)

According to the AP, at the Friday hearing, Drew’s lawyer, Dean Steward, argued the suicide evidence would lead jurors to focus on the death, rather than whether Drew violated the terms of service of MySpace. He added: “The jury is going to end up thinking that Lori Drew is being tried for the death of Megan Meier.” Rather than making a reasoned decision, he said, “this jury is just going to decide this by sympathy.”

The charge against Drew — that she violated the MySpace terms of service — incorporates an allegation that she did it with an intent to harm. So AUSA Mark Krause reportedly argued that Drew is charged with joining in a conspiracy to cause intentional infliction of emotional distress. “Showing that this victim took the ultimate step of taking her own life shows the level of her distress,” Krause said.

Judge Wu reportedly responded that he was convinced many prospective jurors would be aware of the suicide from reading news reports or seeing a recent episode of the TV show “Law and Order” that involved a similar scenario. He said he would instruct jurors that the case was not about the suicide and that Drew is not charged with causing the suicide.

David Kernell, the 20-year-old University of Tennessee student who accessed Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, insists that what he did should not be considered “hacking”.

According to Wired.com, Kernell’s lawyer has filed a motion that would prevent prosecutors and witnesses from classifying what Kernell’s actions as “hacking” and from calling Kernell a “hacker”.

Apparently, the only thing that Kernell did was correctly guess Palin’s security questions by using Google searches to guide him.

All Kernell needed was Palin’s date of birth, ZIP code, and the knowledge of where she met her husband—information that’s available online for anyone to view.

After resetting Palin’s password to “popcorn”, Kernell posted the Alaskan governor’s e-mail and password on the 4chan forums—a large Internet discussion board that ranges in topics from Japanese culture to video games and sports.

Kernell’s lawyer is arguing that hacking usually involves some sort of advanced computer skills to get past security codes and that guessing a password shouldn’t be counted as such.

n the case we’ve come to call the ‘MySpace suicide’ case, how important is the ’suicide’ part? It appears that U.S. District Judge George Wu believes it’s not critical, and is leaning toward excluding the evidence of how 13 year-old Megan Meier hanged herself.

“I don’t necessarily think the suicide is relevant to the crime charged,” Wu said, according to the AP, adding he thought details of Meier’s death would unfairly prejudice the jury. He said he planned to announce his final decision Friday. The trial is set to kick off next Tuesday.

(For past LB coverage of the case, click here.)

Exclusion of the suicide would, of course, be a setback to the government. It would also highlight the divergence between the facts and the law. As Dean Steward, the lawyer for defendant Lori Drew, told us last week, the trial will be in two parts: the legal side, such as what the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act means and whether it can be triggered by violating the MySpace terms of service; and the factual side, the tragic death of a 13 year-old girl and the question of who caused it.

In what strikes us as another interesting twist to the upcoming trial, Steward attempted to waive Drew’s right to a jury trial, but prosecutors refused to assent to the waiver, resulting automatically, according to the AP report, in a jury trial. The prosecutors’ refusal to accept the jury waiver likely came as a surprise to Steward. Last week, he told the Law Blog he suspected the prosecutors would not oppose the jury waiver for fear of offending Judge Wu.

About 50 people gathered Thursday evening to remember Megan Meier, who would have been 16 Thursday.

She most certainly, according to her mother, would have wasted no time in trying to obtain her driver’s license.

“She had talked about getting a car from probably the time she was 12 years old,” said Tina Meier, Megan’s mother. “So today is a hard day. But every day has been hard without her.”

The gathering was at a Dardenne Prairie baseball field on Hanley Road. A photo slide show of Megan’s life played across a sheet fixed to the back of the backstop.

There she was: a toddler with her new baby sister, Allison; a little girl before the Christmas tree; a basketball player at the Boys & Girls Club of St. Charles; and an eighth-grade volleyball player at Immaculate Conception Elementary School.

At times, her image on the sheet seemed to come alive, rolling with the wind.

Megan was 13 when she took her life in October 2006, the victim of a MySpace hoax involving an adult neighbor, Lori Drew, a family friend who had lived four doors away in Dardenne Prairie.

Drew, 49, is scheduled to go to trial for her role in the incident in Los Angeles Nov. 18.

“There are people who are not like Megan – who would not take their own life,” said Tina, 38. “Some people can walk away from it. But there are many who can’t.”

Cassie Thomas, 16, of St. Peters, recalled her friendship with Megan. She last saw Megan two months before her death. They saw a movie together.

“She just meant so much to me,” Cassie said. “She was a lot like me.”

“I was a good friend of hers,” said Brittany Osborn, 16, of O’Fallon. “I’m here to remember her and honor her. She was loving and easy to get along with.”

Those in attendance lit candles. Butch Moore, a family friend, sang “Who You’d Be Today,” written by Kenny Chesney. Some signed what Tina has called “The Megan Pledge,” which states, in part:

“I agree not to use technology as a weapon to hurt others.”

“I agree to think before I click.”

“I agree to think about the person on the other side.”

The goal is 1 million pledges. So far, Tina said, there are 425,000.

People said they came to remember Megan, or to support Tina, or the Meiers, or to support Vicki Dunn, of St. Peters, Tina’s aunt.

“We’re here in honor of Megan Meier and to help reduce cyberbullying – if we can in some small way – and to support the family,” said Jeff Brooks, 43, of Dardenne Prairie. His daughter is a friend of Allison Meier, 12.

Lori Drew, accused of cyber-bullying a teen who later committed suicide, tried but failed Wednesday to get a federal criminal case against her heard by a judge instead of a jury.

Her lawyer, H. Dean Steward, said she waived her right to a jury trial but that prosecutors, whose agreement is required, refused.

St. Louis area prosecutors had said they found no charge applicable to the circumstances. But the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles obtained an indictment in May that charged Drew, formerly of Dardenne Prairie, with unlawfully accessing MySpace computers in the process of harassing her daughter’s rival down the street.

Steward also is trying to keep any mention of the 2006 suicide of Megan Meier, 13, out of the trial, which is set for Nov. 18.

On October 3rd, a rumor that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack sent Apple’s stock crashing down from $105.04 per share to $94.65 per share, equaling a loss of $9 billion in market value. All that in just 10 minutes. That shows how important Steve Jobs is to Apple. It also shows how fragile the market is at times.

Generally, when a fake news story has a substantial impact on the value of a company’s stock, the SEC gets involved. And that’s just what they did this time. Manipulating the value of a stock for your personal gain is a crime with some hefty penalties, so the SEC tried to trace the story and see if it’s originator had any financial reasons for starting the rumor. It turns out he didn’t.

The story made it’s way to CNN’s iReport.com, which is where it really started to hit the mainstream news, but it’s origin was a tad less respectable: an 18 year-old kid posting on 4Chan as a prank.

Here’s the complete post from CNN’s iReport “Citizen Journalist” Web site:
“Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack,” said the false report. “I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.”

There’s a whole world of people out there, and boy, are they pissed off.

On political blogs, the invective flies. Posters respond to the latest celebrity gossip with mockery or worse. Sports fans set up Web sites with names that begin with “fire,” hoping coaches, athletic directors and sportscasters lose their jobs.

And though there are any number of bloggers and commenters who attempt to keep their postings and responses on a civil level, all too often interactive Web sites descend into ad hominem attacks, insults and plain old name-calling. Indeed, there are even whole sites devoted to venting, such as justrage.com (one screed there was titled, “I don’t give a flying f***, so f*** you”) and mybiggestcomplaint.com.

This is not a world Emily Post would want to be caught in after dark.

“The Internet can be a great tool,” said Sara Black, a professor of health studies at St. Joseph’s University who takes a particular interest in online bullying. “Like any tool, it can also be misused.” (more)

LOS ANGELES: A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Friday issued a restraining order against Donald Myers, a member of a cyber-terrorist group known as Anonymous. The order requires Myers to stay at least 50 yards away from a female Scientologist he stalked and harassed. The order also requires Myers to stay away from the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition at the Church of Scientology International building in Hollywood where the victim works, and stay 50 yards away from the woman’s home. The restraining order lasts for 3 years unless renewed.

Myers was found to have engaged in acts of harassment against the young woman, after video evidence was submitted to the court showing Myers stalking her, taunting her with sexual slurs, and refusing repeated requests to leave her alone. Myers was also ordered by the court to turn over any firearms in his possession to the police.

This is the second restraining order issued against a member of Anonymous this week. On October 21, a Boston Court ordered self-styled Anonymous leader Gregg Housh to stay 100 yards away from the Boston Church of Scientology. Housh was placed on probation for one year with the threat from the Court that if he violates the restraining order or any other law, he faces a year in prison.

Anonymous has been implicated in numerous criminal acts, including bomb threats, death threats, vandalism and computer crimes which are being investigated by law enforcement.

On October 17, The U.S. Department of Justice filed federal criminal charges against New Jersey Anonymous member Dmitriy Guzner related to the January 2008 attempted destruction of websites owned by the Church of Scientology. Guzner has agreed to plead guilty to felony charges that could send him to prison for ten years.

In November 2007, Anonymous member Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot and killed seven students, a nurse and a teacher at Jokela High School in Finland before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life. Prior to these acts Auvinen stated on a website used by Anonymous that he would do this all “in the name of Anonymous.” He was immediately encouraged to carry out his threats by other members of the group, who afterwards called him a “hero.”

“Law enforcement and the courts are seeing through the false image that the cyber-terrorist group Anonymous tries to portray to the media and are sending a clear message to everyone – if Anonymous breaks the law, Anonymous will suffer the legal consequences” said Karin Pouw of the Church of Scientology International. She also said that “the Church will never be intimidated by the criminal acts committed by Anonymous members and will continue to work with law enforcement to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice for the protection of the Church and all groups targeted by these terrorists.”

Depending on whom you ask, Massachusetts-based protest organizer Gregg Housh had a major victory – or a significant loss – in Boston Municipal Court this Wednesday. As reported in The Phoenix this past week in the feature “Battling Scientology,” Housh faced charges of harassment, disturbing the peace, and disturbing religious worship for his involvement with the picket group Anonymous and his actions against the Boston Church of Scientology.

According to an Anonymous press statement that circulated earlier this afternoon: “On October 22nd Boston Municipal Court dismissed the charge of criminal harassment against ‘Anonymous’ anti-Scientology activist Gregg Housh, pending an order for the two parties to not approach each other.”

Boston Church of Scientology attorney Marc LaCasse was quick to comment that Housh did not get off so easily. “Gregg Housh – under oath – admitted that the [evidence presented against him] was true. The document he signed is called ‘admission to sufficient facts.’ If it doesn’t get any clearer than that…”

Legally speaking, charges against Housh were not technically dismissed. Instead he agreed to a Continuance without a Finding (CWOF), which the Massachusetts Criminal Defense Resource Page explains as: “Under Massachusetts Criminal Laws, agreeing to a Continuance without a Finding is not the same as pleading guilty. Technically, it is an admission that “there are sufficient facts to find you guilty” of the charges. Pleading to a CWOF will happen at a pre-trial conference as part of a plea agreement, if your attorney can get the prosecutor to agree.” (For more about the legal side see this article from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly).

The good news is that all parties seem to be happy with the outcome. At least for now, it appears that Housh – who was placed on one year probation and who faces one year in prison if he enters within 100 yards of the Boston Church of Scientology on Beacon Street – avoided what promised to be a lengthy trial. On the other side, LaCasse says the outcome works for him: “My client simply wanted to be left alone.”

A new study out of the University of California in Los Angeles finds cyberbullying is more common than previously thought. Almost 75% of teens reported some cyberbullying during the prior 12 months. The most common type of bullying was name calling. That didn’t surprise me, but the second most common type did. The second most common tactic was password theft. If someone steals or guesses your password they can send email in your name, visit websites and make it look like it was you, or edit an online profile and post untrue and unflattering information.

Suffolk District Attorney, 22 Oct 2008

A Boston Municipal Court judge today continued for one year the case against a Woburn man alleged to have disturbed proceedings at the Back Bay Church of Scientology earlier this year, and will dismiss the case if the defendant abides by certain conditions during that time.

Judge Thomas C. Horgan imposed a one-year continuance without a finding in the case against GREGG HOUSH (D.O.B. 10/17/76), who had been charged with disturbing an assembly of worship and disturbing the peace. If Housh stays away from the Back Bay headquarters of the Church of Scientology and its expected new headquarters in Boston’s South End, and if he does not re-offend in any other manner, those charges will be dismissed. If he does not abide by those terms, Housh’s case could be put back on track for trial.

Also in today’s proceedings, Suffolk prosecutors affirmatively moved to dismiss an additional charge of criminal harassment against Housh. After a review of the evidence, prosecutors determined they could not meet their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt on this charge and could not in good faith move forward with it. Had the case gone to trial, prosecutors would have introduced evidence and testimony to show that Housh and others entered the Church of Scientology’s Beacon Street building in a boisterous manner during a March 1 protest, disturbing the proceedings and alarming those inside. Attorney Michael Dlott represented Housh.

A teenager hacker has admitted carrying out a cyber attack that crashed Church of Scientology Web sites as part of a campaign by a mysterious underground group.

According to a report on the News24 site, Dmitriy Guzner, of New Jersey, will plead guilty to computer hacking for his role in launching a distributed denial of service attack against Scientology sites earlier this year, the Justice Department said. According to information filed in Federal Court in Los Angeles, Guzner described himself as a member of a shadowy Internet-based group known as ‘Anonymous’ that has carried out a series of protests against Scientology.

Lawyers representing Lori Drew, the mother who is accused of using the social networking site MySpace to help cyber-bully a teen who then killed herself, filed a motion Monday seeking to throw out the indictment against her.

Prosecutors said Drew and others schemed in 2006 to humiliate Megan Meier, 13, a neighbor in Dardenne Prairie, using a fake teenage boy’s identity on MySpace.

Megan was first a friend, then a “rival” of Drew’s daughter, prosecutors have said.

Federal and state prosecutors in the St. Louis area said they found no charge to apply against Drew, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, where MySpace is based, obtained indictments accusing her of one count of conspiracy and three counts of illegally accessing protected computers.

Prosecutors say Drew violated MySpace’s terms of service, which prohibit lying when registering, soliciting information from someone under 18 and harassing other users.

In the motion filed Monday, her attorneys argue that the government must do more than simply allege that the terms of service were violated.

“The fatal flaw in the government’s case is that MySpace knew perfectly well at all time exactly what it was doing,” the motion says. “MySpace knew that it was providing an account to users who might or might not comply with the Terms of Service. Most users violate Terms of Service frequently, as MySpace is surely aware.”

Drew’s attorneys also argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which Drew is accused of violating, should not be used to punish “everything bad that happens on the Internet.” They also contend the indictment should be tossed because no theft was committed and the law Drew is being charged under requires a theft, as well as that recent legislation implies the law does not apply when the defendant and victim are in the same state.

It was not clear late Monday when a judge could rule on the motion.

A software professional working at Indian outsourcer Infosys Technologies was arrested by the police in Chennai in south India after he was found to have sent threatening email messages to the country’s President, Pratibha Patil. J. Sriram, a 24-year-old engineering graduate working as a programmer at Infosys’ operation in Chennai, told police that he was generally dissatisfied with the political situation in the country, M. Sudhakar, Assistant Commissioner of Police of Chennai’s Cyber Crime Cell said on Friday.

Sriram said that for all the political problems in the country, the politicians were responsible, Sudhakar said.

About 16 email messages that he sent to the President on Oct. 11 and Oct. 12 were more than expressions of disaffection with the political system in the country, and had very threatening content, Sudhakar said.

On a tip from the police in Delhi, who tracked down the IP (Internet Protocol) address from which the email messages were sent, Sriram was arrested and charged on a number of counts, including intimidation and use of obscene language.

Thom Mrozek
Public Affairs Officer

October 17, 2008

NEW JERSEY MAN CHARGED WITH ATTACKING CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY WEBSITES IN THE NAME OF ‘ANONYMOUS’

LOS ANGELES – A New Jersey man was charged today for his role in an attack on Church of Scientology websites in January 2008 that rendered the websites unavailable.

Dmitriy Guzner, 18, of Verona, New Jersey, has agreed to plead guilty to computer hacking for his role in the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the Scientology websites. A DDOS attack occurs where a large amount of malicious Internet traffic is directed at a website or a set of websites. The target websites are unable to handle the high volume of Internet traffic and therefore become unavailable to legitimate users trying to reach the sites.

According to the criminal information filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles, Guzner participated in the attack because he considered himself a member of an underground group called “Anonymous.”  “Anonymous” has led protests against the Church of Scientology at various locations across the country, and in January 2008 posted a video on YouTube which announced a new offensive against Scientology.

Once he pleads guilty, which is expected to take place in the coming weeks in federal court in New Jersey, Guzner faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

This case was investigated by the United States Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force in Los Angeles. The agencies involved in the investigation were the United States Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office Bureau of Investigation.

#####

Release No. 08-140 – original here: http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2008/140.html

An 18-year-old New Jersey man agreed to plead guilty to federal computer hacking charges Friday for participating in a denial-of-service attack against Church of Scientology websites, as part of collective of online troublemakers known as “Anonymous.”

Dmitriy Guzner is charged with a single felony count of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer for the January distributed denial-of-service attack. He faces a likely sentence of 12 to 18 months in prison based on stipulations in his plea agreement, which also obliges him to pay $37,500 in restitution. (more)

Bombing threat

On October 30, 2007, two students, Jeremie Dalin, 17 and Dennis Oh, 17, posted a threat against Stevenson High School on the 4chan website.^{[7][8][9][10]} Oh made a screenshot or photograph of the threat and then created a web page dedicated to the threat.^[11][12] The FBI traced the message, Dalin’s home address, when contacted by the authorities he claimed it was a bad joke and did not intend on harming anyone.^[13] The threat caused approximately 500 students to miss a school day, which happened to be Halloween. Dalin was due back in court in February.^[14]

In an article published in the Daily Herald on June 12, 2008, Jeremie Dalin was convicted “for falsely making a terrorist threat” and faces up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced in mid-July.^[15]

The teenager who committed suicide after an Internet hoax was not the only girl exchanging messages with a fake MySpace address allegedly operated by a woman now charged in the girl’s death, the woman’s lawyer said.

Attorney Dean Steward filed a request in federal court for the phone records of a second teenage girl identified by the initials “S.D.”

His client, Lori Drew, of O’Fallon, Mo., is accused of helping to create a false-identity account on the social networking site, posing as a teenage boy and befriending her 13-year-old neighbor, Megan Meier.

Prosecutors say Megan hanged herself in 2006 after receiving messages from Drew on the fake account saying the world would be better off without her. Megan was being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression.

In his motion, Steward seeks the phone records to prove that prosecutors mistakenly linked Megan to a message that S.D. actually sent to the fake account.

Prosecutors have said the message _ listed in the Drew indictment as “Overt Act 9″ _ was sent by Megan because she was induced by Drew to flirt with the fictitious boy.

Steward criticized the government for poor research and said S.D.’s e-mail address was on the message.

(more)

Washington (ECN) – 20-year old David Kernell has been indicted for hacking into the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The U.S. Justice Department announced on Wednesday that the 20-year old has been indicted, and has since turned himself into authorities.

He is now set to appear before a U.S. judge, where he faces a $250,000 fine, as well as 5 years in prison if convicted.

The indictment states that Kernell hacked into the e-mail account of Palin back on September 16th.

He used the password reset feature to gain access to the Yahoo e-mail account.

He then posted some of the contents of the account, along with the password on an online message board.

The information was published on the site 4chan.org, according to the indictment.

The 20-year old is the son of Democratic state legislator Mike Kernell, and went by the online name rubico.

The criminal case against Lori Drew, accused of helping to cyber-bully a St. Louis area teen who then killed herself, appears to be headed for a November trial date, court documents filed Monday suggest.

(full story)

Clayton — The father of a teenage girl says in a lawsuit that a cyber bully so unnerved her with online taunts that she ended up admitted to a mental health clinic.

The 16-year-old girl is not named in the suit, in St. Louis County Circuit Court in Clayton. Her father’s lawyer, Joe Jacobson, said the identity of the defendant is not known with certainty.

The suit seeks reimbursement for medical expenses in excess of $25,000 and asks that a judge order the Internet social network Facebook and Web portal Live.com to provide information about who sent the messages.

The circumstances are reminiscent of the case of Megan Meier, 13, of Dardenne Prairie, who hanged herself in 2006 after a fictitious boyfriend turned against her in MySpace correspondence.

Lori Drew, the mother of a former friend of Megan’s, is expected to be tried in November in regard to that incident on federal charges of conspiracy and accessing MySpace computers without authorization.

Megan’s death prompted Missouri to create a new crime of Internet harassment, a felony for people over 21 and a misdemeanor for those younger.

The girl in the case Jacobson filed had already undergone outpatient treatment for 22 days in June and July for a psychiatric condition characterized, in part, by an obsessive relationship with a teenage boy, the suit said.

Someone using the fictitious name “Jennifer Litzinger” then created the Facebook account “for the purpose of creating a purported rival” for the boy’s affections, the suit alleges.

Asked about the identity of “Litzinger,” Jacobson said: “There are suspicions. We want good evidence that points firmly at somebody before we proceed.”

The lawsuit says “Litzinger” used a photo “of a well-endowed and attractive model or actress of the approximate age of 20 to 22 obtained over the Internet as her profile photograph so that (the victim), an ordinary attractive 16-year-old, would feel inferior to her purported rival with respect to her physical attractiveness.”

The suit also says that on the day before the teen was to finish outpatient treatment in July, she got multiple communications from “Litzinger.” Those said “Litzinger” had been talking and texting with the boyfriend every day and night, was more attractive than the teen, and that the teen “looked like a troll” and had “a worthless life.”

According to the suit, “Litzinger” knew the teen “would be severely emotionally distressed by the statements.”

The teen was taken to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center for a four-day admission to stabilize her condition, the suit says, and then she entered the Menninger Residential Clinic in Houston, where she remained until Sept. 16.

Her father, who lives in west St. Louis County, declined through his lawyer to comment to a reporter. The suit was filed Sept. 19.

The girl “is doing much better since Texas, but she is still very, very fragile,” Jacobson said.

Last week, an Oregon state judge ruled that Oregon’s media shield law, found at Or. Rev. Stat. §§ 44.510 to 44.540, protected the identity of an anonymous commenter who posted allegedly defamatory statements on the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week websites.

According to the Portland Mercury, staff writer Amy Ruiz wrote a post in January 2008 about Portland mayoral candidate Sho Dozono. In the comments section, a site user going by “Ronald” posted negative comments about Dozono’s ties to a local businessman, Terry Beard. The same commenter allegedly posted similar statements on the Willamette Week site. Beard filed a motion to compel the two online newspapers to give up “Ronald’s” IP address before an Oregon state court. The two competitors teamed up to oppose the discovery request and won.

Interestingly, Judge James E. Redman of Clackamas County Court did not treat “Ronald” as a confidential source. Section 44.520(a) of the Oregon Revised Statutes protects from disclosure “[t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public.” Instead, the court relied on section 44.520(b), which protects “[a]ny unpublished information obtained or prepared by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public.” Section 44.510(1) defines “information” as including “any written, oral, pictorial or electronically recorded news or other data.” The court characterized “Ronald’s” IP address as data.

On the question of whether the newspapers obtained this data in the course of newsgathering, Judge Redman drew a line based on the relevance of the blog comment to the post it’s attached to:

If the comment had been totally unrelated to the blog post, then the argument could be made that the Portland Mercury did not receive it in the “course of gathering, receiving, or processing information for any medium of communication to the public.” (source)

Concluding that the IP address fit within the shield law’s “broad statutory language,” the court denied Beard’s motion to compel.

Perhaps we’re seeing an emerging trend. In September, a Montana judge ruled that his state’s shield law protected the identity of an anonymous commenter to the Billings Gazette. (See my post for details.) Previously, anonymous commenters and service providers had relied almost exclusively on First Amendment protection for anonymous speech to block these kinds of discovery requests.

A 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee has been indicted for breaking into one of the email accounts of Gov. Sarah Palin and then posting screenshots of personal information obtained there to a public Web-site.

David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state lawmaker, was led into a Knoxville federal court wearing handcuffs and shackles on his ankles today and was released without posting bond, according to the Associated Press.

According to the indictment, Kernell broke into the account, gov.palin@yahoo.com, by using Yahoo’s password recovery tool. After researching and correctly answering a series of personal questions from Yahoo, Kernell was allowed to reset the password. He chose ‘popcorn,’ according to the indictment.

The personal information he discovered there included the email addresses of family members, pictures of family members and Gov. Palin’s address book for her Yahoo email account. It was posted on www.4CHAN.org.

Learning of an investigation, Kernell “removed, altered, concealed and covered up files on his laptop computer,” the indictment says.

Trial is set for Dec. 16. He faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.

A charity golf tournmament honoring the memory of Megan Meier is planned this month to benefit a organization dedicated to suicide prevention.

The CHADS Coalition raises money to support research of early-onset mental illness and suicide prevention programs for adolescents and young adults.

Megan, 13, hanged herself in her Dardenne Prairie home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages from a ficticious MySpace profile created by neighbors.

The golf match will begin at 2 p.m. Oct. 25 at the Pheasant Run Golf Course. The event includes a silent auction, dinner and prizes.

For more information, call the golf course at 636-379-0099 or call Megan’s father, Ron Meier, at 636-485-9788.

In the spring of 2007, the government of Estonia, a small independent Baltic state and former Soviet republic, made the decision to remove a Soviet war memorial from the city of Tallinn. The Russian government expressed its disapproval of the action.

Shortly thereafter, Estonia’s national IT network was subject to a cyber attack so intense and prolonged that it impacted the government’s ability to function. Web sites and servers of banks, broadcasters, newspapers and telecoms were also assaulted. The situation was so dire, that – after three weeks – NATO experts were called in to help.

While this type of cyber warfare is the extreme of cyber crime, there is no doubt that as people, business and the public sector have increased their online presence, so have criminals.

Over a year ago, Mourad Debbabi (Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering and Concordia University Research Chair Tier I in Information Systems Security) was invited to a meeting that included Canadian law enforcement officials, as well representatives of the banking, telecommunications, financial and public sectors.

“I was the only academic present,” he said.

The purpose of the meeting was to develop a national organisation to fight cyber crime. One of the speakers, an agent from the FBI, described a relatively new organization in the US called the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA).

The NCFTA is neutral collaborative venue where critical confidential information about cyber incidents can be shared discreetly among industry, academia and law enforcement. The Alliance facilitates advanced training, promotes security awareness to reduce cyber-vulnerability, and conducts research in cyber forensics.

At the end of the meeting, participants asked themselves if such an organization was required in Canada.

“The answer was a resounding, unanimous yes,” said Debbabi.

NCFTA Canada was formally launched in July 2008 with Concordia as its primary host. While the legalities of the collaborative effort are still in negotiation among the partners – which include Bell Canada, the Competition Bureau of Canada, Rogers Communications, and Microsoft Canada – technical operations are starting this fall.

Debbabi, whose research focuses on cyber forensics, explained that the mandate of the organization is quite broad.

“Cyber crime includes any criminal activity where computers or computer systems are either the tool or the target – child porn and exploitation, identity theft, hacking, fraud, and any kind illegal digital transaction.”

Partners will target reductions in and improved defense against activities such as SPAMming, phishing and denial of service attacks like those launched against organizations such as the Church of Scientology earlier this year.

Debbabi underlined that these types of attacks account for billions of lost dollars and uncountable hours of lost productivity each year.

He is currently serving as NCFTA Canada’s Vice-President and a member of the Board of Directors, where his role is to, “ oversee establishment of the organization, its operation and management, and student and research project supervision.”

He is pleased Concordia was chosen as the host institution because, “we have the largest concentration of researchers focused on IT Security and cyber forensics in Canada.”

CIISE offers a master’s degree in the area, which currently has more than 150 students.

Debbabi believes the partnership created through NCTFA will expand students’ access to real world training opportunities and industry’s access to emerging means of dealing with threats.

“As a researcher, I know when I give a forensic toolkit to cyber investigators for testing and evaluation, I will receive significant feedback which will help in the development of better tools. NCFTA Canada is really all about increasing our efficiency at fighting cyber crime. Alone, none of us can achieve much, together we are very much better.”

A federal grand jury in Chattanooga ended its session Tuesday without indicting a University of Tennessee student who authorities believe may have hacked into vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account.

The FBI’s investigation into David Kernell’s activities, however, is ongoing, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Knoxville is overseeing the case, but U.S. Attorney Russ Dedrick declined to comment Tuesday on when, or if, another grand jury will resume hearing evidence from the FBI’s investigation.

“Grand juries can pursue investigations for many sessions,” Mr. Dedrick said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chattanooga confirmed Monday that the local federal grand jury would be evaluating the case Tuesday. Grand juries are responsible for hearing basic evidence in a case and then deciding whether to indict a suspect for a specific crime.

Grand jury proceedings are not open to the public, and it is not known what evidence the grand jury here might have heard Tuesday in relation to the case against Mr. Kernell.

Three students arrived at the federal courthouse on Georgia Avenue about 8:45 a.m. Tuesday to testify about Mr. Kernell, the son of state Rep. Michael Kernell, D-Memphis. The students did not provide their names and did not answer questions about the case. An attorney with them from Maryville, Tenn., declined comment, as well.

The students were allowed to leave the courthouse through the back door, where members of the public generally are not allowed.

FBI agents from Knoxville exited the front doors of the courthouse about 10 a.m., also declining to comment on any aspect of the case.

A hacker last week broke into one of the Yahoo Inc. e-mail accounts used by Alaska Gov. Palin, the running mate of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The McCain campaign acknowledged the act, calling it illegal and an invasion of her privacy.

The FBI began investigating Mr. Kernell over the weekend, according to the Justice Department. Investigators searched his apartment in Knoxville, but they did not file any criminal charges immediately.

Mr. Kernell, 20, is an economics major at UT. Kernell family attorney Wade V. Davies wrote in a letter Monday that “the Kernell family wants to do the right thing, and they want what is best for their son.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

The Missouri woman charged with orchestrating a cruel online hoax that led to the suicide of a teenage girl was once so pleased with her prank that she shared details of the ongoing scheme with her hairdresser and other acquaintances, according to prosecutors. During conversations with several individuals, Lori Drew explained how she and others were “playing a joke on” Megan Meier, a 13-year-girl who was a rival of Drew’s daughter. That joke involved Drew’s creation of a MySpace page for a “Josh Evans,” a nonexistent boy who took an online liking to Meier, but then abruptly turned on the girl, telling her on October 16, 2006 that the world would be a better place without her. A distraught Meier committed suicide later that day. In May, Drew was named in a four-count federal indictment charging her with conspiracy and computer fraud in connection with the MySpace scheme. In a court filing yesterday, prosecutors revealed how Drew spoke of the hoax as it was underway, and “denied any untoward purpose and dismissed concerns over her ‘prank.” An excerpt of the September 22 document can be found below. While Drew appeared proud of her MySpace gambit while it was active, after Meier’s suicide she sought to cover her tracks and mask her involvement in the plot. When questioned by FBI agents, Drew said that while she knew of the MySpace hoax, she was not involved in the creation of the phony “Josh Evans” account. Additionally, when agents surreptitiously recorded a conversation between Drew and Meier’s mother, Drew “again disclaimed involvement in the scheme.” Drew, pictured above, is scheduled for trial next month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

A gunman who shot dead ten people at a school in Finland before killing himself had been questioned by police earlier this week over YouTube videos showing him at a shooting range, the country’s interior minister said.

Police were alerted to a clip posted on the video sharing website showing a young man wielding a handgun at a shooting range, Anne Holmlund said.

“Police reached him on Monday, Sept 22, and asked him to be interviewed regarding the shooting video,” Ms Holmlund said. He was later released.

She said the man arrested, identified by the school’s headmaster as Matti Juhani Saari, had a temporary permit for a .22 calibre pistol and that the permit had not been withdrawn.

Link: Video report on massacre

At 11am (800 GMT) today, a man stormed the vocational school in the town of Kauhajoki, 120 miles from Helsinki, in northwest Finland, firing “many shots” that left ten people dead. He died later in hospital after turning the gun on himself.

“Within a short space of time I heard several dozen rounds of shots, in other words it was an automatic pistol,” school janitor Jukka Forsberg told Finnish broadcaster YLE.

“I saw some female students who were wailing and moaning and one managed to escape out of the back door.”

“He also shot towards me, did not say anything and once the bullets started to whizz by I started running for my life.”

Finnish media said YouTube clips of a man firing a gun appeared to be linked to the shooting. In one of them, a young man wearing a leather jacket fires several shots in rapid succession with a handgun at what appears to be a shooting range.

Link: Shooting Range video by suspect Matti Saari

The posting was made five days before the shooting and the location was given as Kauhajoki. The posting included a message saying: “Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war.”

Link: “You will die next” video by suspect Matti Saari

The shooting raised the spectre of the massacre at a Finnish high school in Jokela, north of Helsinki, less than a year ago.

On November 7, 2007, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot six students, the school’s headmistress and a nurse before turning his gun on himself.

Auvinen, who had posted footage foreshadowing the November 2007 massacre on YouTube, was a student at the school.

In the video, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, described himself as a “social Darwinist” who would “eliminate all who I see unfit”.

Link: Report about Pekka-Eric Auvinen

The 2007 attack triggered a fierce debate about gun laws in the Nordic nation with deep-rooted traditions of hunting in the sub-Arctic wilderness.

With 1.6 million firearms in private hands, Finland is an anomaly in Europe, lagging behind only the US and Yemen in civilian gun ownership.

Reports of Oprah Winfrey being found dead have swept the internet, although no reliable news organisations were being sourced. There’s a reason for that: SHE’S NOT DEAD.

According to wikinews.org, it’s part of an internet hoax that was either started by a group known as Anonymous or from a website 4chan.org. Either way, it’s sick.

A hacker claims to have cracked the web site of Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and purloined a list of subscribers to the site, which includes their names, e-mail addresses, city and state, and the password they use for their registration to the site.

The attack was retaliation for comments that O’Reilly made on the air this week about web sites that published e-mails obtained from the Yahoo account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, according to a press release distributed by WikiLeaks late Friday.

The hacker sent WikiLeaks a screenshot of O’Reilly’s subscriber list as proof of the deed, which WikiLeaks has posted online.

This week on his Fox show, O’Reilly slammed web sites, such as WikiLeaks and Gawker, for posting screenshots of e-mails, family photos and a list of contacts taken from Palin’s private e-mail account.

“They’re trafficking in stolen merchandise,” O’Reilly said during one of his shows, calling for their prosecution. He also referred to a site that published the screenshots as “despicable, slimy, scummy.”

In the video above, O’Reilly spoke with Amanda Carpenter, a reporter for Townhall.com who agreed with him and said that a web site that published such information was “complicit” in the hack of Palin’s e-mail account.

“They think it’s newsworthy, even though the information was absolutely, illegally obtained,” she said.

Neither O’Reilly nor Carpenter mentioned the First Amendment protection that media organizations, such as Fox News and Townhall.com, are generally afforded for publishing newsworthy information.

That segment was followed the next day by a segment with Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, a lawyer, who explained why the First Amendment would protect the sites. (See video below.)

O’Reilly, disagreed with her, however.

“If your grandma sends you 50 bucks for your birthday and somebody steals the letter and gives it to somebody else and they take the 50 bucks, they’re going to get charged as well as this person who stole the letter,” he said.

Kelly explained that taking stolen money and publishing news were not the same.

“That’s crazy,” he said.

“No it’s not crazy,” Kelly replied. “Because . . . what if somebody obtained a document illegally that proved some massive conspiracy among the presidential candidates and they leaked it to Fox News and we knew it was stolen. You don’t think we’d put it on the air? You’re darn right we would. And it’s not illegal.”

WikiLeaks said in its press release that it had confirmed the authenticity of the list, but didn’t mention how it did so.

Efforts by Threat Level to contact Fox News and some of the subscribers on the list to independently verify the authenticity of the list were unsuccessful.

By Ryan Singel September 19, 2008 | 3:04:51 PMCategories: Hacks and Cracks

Anonymous isn’t so anonymous anymore.

At least not after one “member” of Anonymous, the loose confederation of online troublemakers, broke into the personal e-mail account of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and then posted the new password to Anonymous’ online message board.

From there, others slipped screenshots and family photos to the leak-releasing website Wikileaks, launching a maelstrom of media coverage and widespread speculation as to the e-mail hacker’s real name.

For those unfamiliar, Anonymous is a group you can’t join, except by hanging out for a long time in the internet’s most juvenile corners — usually one of the image boards where everyone posts anonymously. 4chan’s /b/ board — or random — seems to be the main hangout, though other chans and IR channels seem to serve as adjunct clubhouses as well. The hangouts have almost no rules –  though using some variation of the terms fag, nigger and jew seems mandatory in every post.

The self-identified Palin-email burglar who uses the online handle Rubico said he got the idea while hanging out at 4chan — specifically its random or /b/ board (NSFW).

After watching others on the board temporarily lock up the e-mail account by trying primitive ways to break in, Rubico decided to call on the power of Google. With a combination of answers found through searches and an educated guess, Rubico was able to reset the account’s password.

Though Fox News famously and hilariously called Anonymous “hackers on steriods,” in large part they have little skill besides knowing how to use a web proxy to mask their IP addresses.

Instead, Anonymous keyboard miscreants combine online Fight Club-like bravado, inside jokes documented only on the world’s stupidest wiki, and harassment tactics that sound funny in theory but in practice are streaked with cruelty. The point? Fun at other people’s expense — otherwise known as Lulz.

The basic repertoire? Prank phone calls, ordering pizzas to someone’s house, flooding a message board with obscene ASCII art. Advanced techniques include finding a way into someone’s MySpace account in order to send messages to their friends saying they are gay.

What are Anonymous’ greatest or worst hits?

The Epilepsy Attack — In March, a group of internet griefers flooded an epilepsy message board with flashing images that caused migraine headaches and seizures in some users. While it’s not certain whether it was properly the work of Anonymous, the assault was rumored to have started on a thread at 7chan.org — another Anonymous hang out — and much was blamed on eBaumsworld, an online site often derided by Anonymous.

The FBI is reportedly investigating what may be the first computer attack that physically harmed people.

The Scientology War — In January, Anonymous decided to take on a real target — the Church of Scientology — which its members considered to be an overly litigious cult. Soon, anonymous pranksters were ordering pizzas to Scientology offices, using denial-of-service attacks to scuttle its web servers and posting previously unseen secret Scientology documents.

They also briefly pointed denial-of-service attack tools at the wrong IP address — which happened to be a Dutch school.

The publicity drew hordes who wanted to participate, and soon many longtime Anonymous users found themselves annoyed with the new converts who thought Anonymous was a crusading organization.

The Habbo Hotel Raid – Anonymous has staged many minor incursions into other people’s online playgrounds, but one of the most storied involved a virtual world known as Habbo — a frequent target for bored Anonymous lurkers interested in ruining other people’s fun.

In 2006, hundreds of Anonymous users showed up using identically dressed avatars: a black man with an Afro in a grey suit. They blocked off the pool to other users, claiming it was infected with AIDS. They also formed swastika-like formations and flooded the site with stupid internet sayings. When users were banned, they claimed it was racist.

The Mitchell Henderson Harassment — The suicide of Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader, stirred Anonymous, who gleefully decided that Henderson shot himself because he had lost his iPod, a fact he’d noted on his MySpace page. Anonymous grabbed onto a badly written message on an online memorial page for him, and turned the phrase “an hero” into an internet meme.

For more than a year, Anonymous kept up the fun, calling Henderson’s parents, pretending to be his ghost.

The Hal Turner Campaign – In late 2006 and early 2007, Anonymous had much fun with Hal Turner, a small-time white supremacist who ran an online radio show. Anonymous flooded one of his shows with prank calls, which then escalated in mutual internet stupidity.

Anonymous eventually flooded his site with too much traffic for his web host to handle. Turner tried suing the image boards — unsuccessfully — and finally he closed down his show after a hacker managed to unearth correspondence suggesting Turner was an FBI informant.

Details describing how someone hacked into the Yahoo Mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (pictured) emerged on Thursday.

The hack appears to have been accomplished through little more than social engineering, the process of acquiring personal information through social manipulation. The hackers exploited known weaknesses in Yahoo Mail’s password-recovery feature.

The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that a 20-year-old University of Tennessee student has been contacted in connection to the federal investigation of the break-in.

Since Tuesday, anonymous posters using a forum on the 4chan.org website have been circulating password-protected zip files containing the contents of the now-deleted email account once belonging to Palin. Various posts to the /b/ board have also provided insight into how the hack was carried out.

Like most web account services, Yahoo Mail provides an option to reset or recover one’s user name and password. What is unclear is how the account recovery was rerouted from the alternative email address chosen by Palin to a secondary email address.

One poster said it took only 15 seconds on Wikipedia to answer Yahoo Mail’s prompt for Palin’s birthday.

As regards the prompt for a ZIP code, Wasilla, Alaska, has only two ZIP codes.

However, Palin’s personal security question — ‘Where did you meet your spouse?’ — did slow the process down. The poster claimed it took several tries before they eventually hit upon the correct answer: Wasilla High School.

Webmail accounts are not alone in using online security questions.

In May, Acxiom, a Little Rock, Arkansas-based data-warehouse company, announced it was introducing a biographical authentication service that asks users of online banking and e-commerce sites random questions based on their personal lives, such as “How many fireplaces are in your current residence?”. The answer can be obtained from any US real-estate website.

Anonymous hackers have gained access to the personal e-mail account of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Those behind the hack put screenshots of messages in Ms Palin’s Yahoo inbox on the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks.

In a statement the McCain campaign said: “This is a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law.”

It said it had handed investigation of the matter over to US law enforcement authorities.

Deleted messages

The documents posted to Wikileaks were from Ms Palin’s gov.palin@yahoo.com e-mail account and included five screenshots, two digital photos of her family and an address book.

The McCain campaign urged those in possession of the documents to destroy them.

The attack was carried out by a loose coalition of hackers which calls itself “Anonymous”.

The attack comes as Ms Palin falls under scrutiny for the way that she used personal e-mail accounts to conduct state business as governor of Alaska. US law dictates that all messages connected to official business as state governor must be preserved.

By contrast, personal messages can be deleted.

Ms Palin is being investigated for abuse of power by attempting to sack a state trooper who had recently been divorced from Ms Palin’s sister.

Subsequent investigation has shown that the gov.palin@yahoo.com account has been shut down along with another, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, also owned by Ms Palin.

It is not clear yet what methods the hacking group used to access to the e-mail account. The screenshots posted by the hackers reveal that they carried out the attack via a so-called proxy service to hide their tracks and limit the chance that they would be traced.

Earlier in 2008 the Anonymous group launched several online assaults against the Church of Scientology.

The Internet has changed the playground bully into the in-my-bedroom-bully.

The Internet has changed the playground bully into the in-my-bedroom-bully. It’s true; the line between school life and home life is gone. Kids can no longer leave the social pressures, cliques, bullies, snootiness and the other highlights of adolescence at school.

Today, bullying/cyberbullying is:
Creative

Options for a bully circa 1980 were to steal some lunch money, call someone a name and maybe shove them into a locker. Today, kids can poke, message, email, text, post on their wall, send them a mean virtual present … the list goes on and on and changes by the day.  The Internet has brought thousands of ways to bully someone without ever being caught.
Instant

Before, if you got in a fight at school, or found out you were not invited to a party, you were able to come home and vent about it to your family, get a snack and cool off. Now, if you are mad at someone, you can instantly send a text message to your social networking profile to post a mean comment. Now there is no ‘off’ time and the second something happens, everyone knows about it because they all get alerts or texts from automated news feeds or plugged-in friends. Teens are checking these services constantly, so before what took a few days to spread, now can take a few minutes.
Permanent

Some things, like postings on your wall, video, a text message or email, you can delete. Other things, such as photos or social network announcements can be up there forever or until the writer removes them. A black eye can disappear, posted messages may not.
Buffered

It is really hard to walk up to someone and say to them: “You are a fat pig.” It is much easier to write that on someone’s Facebook wall. Technology provides a way for students to be mean even more ‘behind the back.’ Many times, you can even post pictures, videos or send messages anonymously! This has changed the face of bullying because it allows people to be mean and not face the consequences—they can’t get punched back and they can hide it from parents and teachers.

It is really important to talk about these new aspects of bullying. Make sure to discuss the ramifications of letting a friend take a sexy picture, disabling the Facebook wall or what would happen if they got in a fight with a friend.

Parents, let your kids know they can always come to you or to a teacher if they see or feel something uncomfortable online.

Vanessa Van Petten is the author of the book You’re Grounded! Her parenting tips as a family peacemaker have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fox 5 New York, and CBS. Please check out her site: http://www.OnTeensToday.com and email your questions for future columns to vvanpetten@rrules.com

Anonymous traces back to 2004 as a group of computer gamers and aspiring hackers, harassing other computer users. Message and image boards [Internet forums that permit users to post images and messages together] such as “enturbulation.org,” “4chan,” “7chan,” “420chan,” “711chan” and other *chans continue to form the core online haunts for the group. The London Guardian described 4chan as “lunatic, juvenile …” Anonymous derives its inspiration from forbidden fascist literature, such as their reference to Mein Kampf and liberally uses symbols of hate to instill fear into people.

One of Anonymous’s resources is Encyclopedia Dramatic (ED), a sick parody of Wikipedia written in an abusive style. Its “humor” is thin veneer covering deeply-rooted hate speech. There is no justification for pages such as the pages “Ni***r Manual” that advocates regular beatings of African Americans, or their page describing the Holocaust as “good times” with graphic images of the death and destruction perpetrated during the Holocaust.

Coordinating their actions through these forums and image boards, particularly 4chan and enturbulation.org, Anonymous has flooded computers of MySpace users with viruses and pornographic pictures and has raided online gaming sites. Their actions are anti-Semitic or racist or some other manifestation of bigotry; when people object, members respond with telephone threats uttered by computer-generated voices or with malicious computer attacks.

Anonymous is a convenient facade for criminal activity on the Internet and in the real world. Behind that facade are people, some of whom literally, not just figuratively, hide behind masks as they vent their basest impulses while rationalizing that their anonymity frees them from responsibility for their acts.

In July 2007, Fox News aired a special report exposing the actions of Anonymous. The report covered an attack on a MySpace user, whose account had been “hacked” into by Anonymous, and plastered with images of gay pornography. The MySpace user also claimed a virus written by Anonymous hackers was sent to him and to ninety friends on his MySpace contact list, crashing thirty-two of his friends’ computers. The report also included “raids” on other Internet communities.

In response, Fox News computers were assaulted with massive attacks from multiple computer systems designed to overload Fox’s computers (i.e a DDoS attack – Distributed Denial of Service attack) and Anonymous issued an even bolder statement of their purpose than it had previously ever articulated.

“We are the face of chaos and the harborings [sic] of judgment. We’ll laugh in the face of tragedy. We’ll mock those who are in pain. We ruin the lives of other people simply because we can. A man takes out his aggression on the cat. We laugh. Hundreds die in a plane crash. We laugh. The nation mourns over a school shooting, we laugh. We’re the embodiment of humanity with no remorse, no caring, no love, or no sense of morality.”

In keeping with this “mission statement,” the Anonymous hit list has included MySpace, Fox News, the Epilepsy Foundation website, prominent hip-hop websites and many others. Their attack against the Church of Scientology is for the same purpose.

On January 17, 2008, “Anonymous” declared its intention to destroy the Church of Scientology.

Immediately following that declaration, Scientology churches, leaders, staff members, and parishioners were deluged by bomb threats, death threats, vandalism, harassment, attempts at intimidation, and systematic interference with their telephones, fax machines, and websites. Individual Scientologists were harassed and prevented from attending services at their churches. Hate speech and hate crimes became a coordinated activity, and the perpetrators hid their identities behind masks like common criminals and terrorists.

Anonymous has fueled religious hatred and intolerance by denigrating the Scientology religion and its founder.

Hate crimes of Anonymous against the Church of Scientology per the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles:

- Death threats against Scientologists and its ecclesiastical leaders

- Threats to destroy churches of Scientology by detonating bombs in churches in the United States

- Mailing of envelopes containing fake anthrax to 25 churches

- 41 death threats

- 56 bomb and arson threats

- 103 threats of other violence

- 40 incidents of vandalism, including an attempt to set fire to one of our churches in Los Angeles

- 3.6 million harassing emails and 141 million malicious hits against Church websites, in an attempt to bring down those sites.

Anonymous attacks against the Church of Scientology have resulted in multiple local law enforcement investigations and two federal investigations into the individuals behind the crimes, putting the matter rightfully in the hands of law enforcement for prosecution of their hate crimes.

Posted with approval of the author.

US rapper Soulja Boy has been targeted by cyber vandals who defaced his MySpace profile and published his email and YouTube passwords on the internet.

The hackers, reportedly part of the popular online community 4chan, contacted Soulja Boy demanding he hand over $US2500 in order to regain control over his account.

The rapper, who published tracks on the internet before becoming a mainstream star in September last year with the number one hit Crank That (Soulja Boy), refused.

His MySpace page was then wiped out and replaced with obscenity-laden messages where Soulja Boy purportedly declared his homosexuality and told fans to “go f— yourselves”.

The miscreants also published the rapper’s passwords – including to his email, souljaboytellem@mac.com – on the internet, and flooded his website’s online chatroom.

The saga ended when Soulja Boy’s record label, Interscope, contacted MySpace and demanded the account be returned.

His YouTube and email accounts have also been returned, Soulja Boy said in a recent YouTube video.

“Niggas sent me a message on MySpace saying I got your shit, send me $2500 if you want it back,” he says in the video.

“I texted back saying f— you, bitch, do what you do, the mother f—er got to be f—ed up. And then after that he deleted all my shit and I was like well darn the nigga wasn’t bluffin.”

Soulja Boy says in the video that he was going to offer a $US10,000 reward to anyone who revealed the hacker’s identity but this was unnecessary as he had already caught them.

“On the next video y’all stay tuned to see what we did with this hacker – we gotta make an example out of this shit.”

The video was published last week and since then Soulja Boy has published a number of other clips on YouTube, none of which mention the hacking saga.

The hack appears to be unrelated to a recent online feud with gangsta rap veteran Ice-T, who labelled Soulja Boy’s music garbage that was killing hip-hop. The comments started a war on YouTube and Souljah Boy responded with a cartoon that mocked Ice-T and his dancing.

Celebrities’ MySpace pages are regular targets for hackers looking to increase their notoriety or expose private photos and messages.

In 2007, a person wanting to impress a hacker group broke into the MySpace profiles of Justin Timberlake, Hilary Duff and MTV personality Tila Tequila. Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus Alicia Keys and Nas have also had their profiles compromised in the past.

By Tony Gordon | Daily Herald Staff

Published: 8/16/2008 12:05 AM

A few minutes of Internet fantasy crashed hard into Jeremie Dalin’s life Friday.

The 18-year-old from Fox River Grove left the Lake County courthouse in Waukegan with a heavy heart and a long list of obligations to meet for his crime of making a threat against Stevenson High School.

Dalin was convicted in June of falsely making a terrorist threat for a posting he placed on an Internet message board that said, in part, “many will die at Adlai E. Stevenson High School on 10/31.”

And although the message was on the Internet for only five to 11 minutes on Oct. 29, it touched off a panic and other events that have left Dalin a felon.

Dennis Oh, 18, a Stevenson student, saw the message, made a copy of it and posted it at other sites, and e-mailed copies to some friends after being told by police not to discuss it.

Lincolnshire police detective Adam Hyde testified Friday that what Oh did sparked a fear so great in the community that the school received more than 500 phone calls the next day from parents concerned about the threat.

Oh, of 1245 Deerfield Parkway, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor obstruction of justice in March and was placed on court supervision.

By 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 30, anti-terrorism experts from the FBI were standing in Dalin’s driveway at 209 Bridle Path to begin sending him on the journey that ended with his conviction.

In his statement to the court, Dalin said he has sought consolation through the Internet since moving here from Switzerland three years ago.

He said he found solace there as he struggled to deal with isolation, the difficulty of learning a new language and troubles within his family.

“The only real person that wouldn’t judge me, talk back, be angry or mistreat me was the computer,” Dalin read from a letter to Associate Judge Christopher Stride. “To me, the Internet was a place where I could vent, cry and swear without anyone judging me.”

Both Lake County Assistant State’s Attorney Mary Stanton and defense attorney Michael Levinsohn asked Stride to spare Dalin any jail time, and the judge quickly agreed.

Stanton did request a sentence that would impress upon Dalin and others who may be tempted to act in a similar fashion that such an activity was not a joke.

“People have to understand what is going on in this country since Columbine and other scenes where armed people have descended on schools,” she said. “We live in a different world now.”

Stride said he recognized Dalin’s remorse and lack of prior criminal record, but also said Dalin needed to look into the face of what he had done.

“Imagine how those parents felt that day who did not know if their children were safe,” he told Dalin. “Parents whose hearts must have been in their throats thinking they had kissed their children goodbye that morning and now might never see them again.”

Stride sentenced Dalin to two years on probation and warned him he could face up to 15 years in prison if he violates any conditions.

He also ordered Dalin to write a letter of apology to Stevenson High School, which after it is approved by Dalin’s probation officer and the judge, will have to be personally delivered to school officials by Dalin.

Dalin also must complete 300 hours of community service, which Stride said he wants to be concentrated on Dalin sharing his experiences with other students.

Lastly, he ordered Dalin’s Internet use be strictly monitored and restricted to web sites approved for education and employment purposes.

Documentation for download (PDF)

After executives at an Ann Arbor venture capital firm discovered an anonymous, negative Internet posting about the company, they weren’t just mad: They decided to sue.

In a court filing, EDF Ventures accused “John Doe” of defamation for implying in a comment posted on the Web that the people running the firm were dishonest. The comment was made on a California-based Web site called The Funded, which was created to allow entrepreneurs to rate investors anonymously. (more)

A teen convicted of falsely making a terrorist threat against Stevenson High School will serve 24 months of probation and must meet other conditions of his sentencing.

Jeremie Dalin, 17, of the 200 block of Bridle Path, Fox River Grove, was sentenced Aug. 15 in Lake County Circuit Court by Judge Christopher Stride. (more)

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A lawyer for the woman accused of using the Internet to bully a Dardenne Prairie teen to the point of suicide has requested some of the girl’s medical records, claiming the girl was mentally ill and suggesting a change in her medication could have caused her death. (more of this disgusting story)