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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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31 August 2003 - 6:08 pm
All the media sites have been covering the FBI's arrest of a MN teenager, Jeffrey Lee Parson, in connection with the recent Blaster virus that swept the Internet a week ago. The FBI seems to see this as a major coup for the revamped, high-tech, post-9/11 agency. "With this arrest, we want to deliver a message to cyber-hackers here and around the world," said U.S. Attorney John McKay in Seattle. "Let there be no mistake about it, cyber-hacking is a crime. ... We will investigate, arrest and prosecute cyber-hackers." What doesn't, however, merit much mention is the fact that Parson's variant of the Blaster worm ("Blaster.B") only infected about 7,000 of the estimated half-million computers that were infected with Blaster and all its variants. Which to me sounds a lot like the FBI's "message" to "cyber-hackers" is more talk than action. What is also interesting is that Parson's height and weight (6'4" and 320 lbs) is placed much more prominently than most any information about his actual crimes. Since his physical stature obviously doesn't have any bearing on the case against him, I wonder how high his height and weight would be placed if he were 5'11" tall and weighed 185 lbs?
Posted by on 31 August 2003 at 6:08 PM
Comments
Right, the article I saw said he was "physically imposing" so I was expecting Hulk Hogan, but the picture of him wasn't all that scary.
I guess if you compute the density of hackons per unit volume, the 5'11" tall 185 lb hacker should be a bit scarier than this guy.
Posted by rkc on 31 August 2003 - 7:56 PM
his variant of the worm registered every new infected computer at his own domain, something like teekids.com, so Parson basically put a big "catch me" sign on his own back. Another take on the situation of computer crime enforcement:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/08/31/BU226337.DTL&type=business
Posted by Charlie on 1 September 2003 - 2:42 PM
Actually, I think his domain was t33kid.com. Interstingly, I forgot my hacker speak when typing that into my browser a moment ago and got http://teekid.com, which has apparently been gobbled up by yahoo.
Posted by david on 2 September 2003 - 4:21 PM