A Minnesota hacker prosecutors described as a “depraved criminal” was handed an 18-year prison term for unleashing a vendetta of cyberterror that turned his neighbours’ lives into a living nightmare.
Barry Ardolf, 46, repeatedly hacked into his next-door neighbours’ Wi-Fi network in 2009 and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden.
A forensics computer investigator working for Kostolnik’s law firm examined the packet logs and found the e-mail sessions sending the threats. In the data surrounding the threatening traffic, they found traffic containing Ardolf’s name and Comcast account.
The FBI got a search warrant for Ardolf’s house and computer and found reams of evidence, including copies of data swiped from the Kostolniks’ computer, and hacking manuals with titles such as Cracking WEP Using Backtrack: A Beginner’s Guide; Tutorial: Simple WEP Crack Aircracking and Cracking WEP with BackTrack 3 — Step-by-Step instructions. They also found handwritten notes laying out Ardolf’s revenge plans and a cache of postal mail that Ardolf had apparently stolen from the Kostolniks’ mailbox and stashed under his bed.
“One of the manuals had Ardolf’s handwriting on it and another had the unique identifying ID for the Kostolniks’ router typed into it,” Rank, the prosector, wrote.
Excerpted from: Wi-Fi–Hacking Neighbour From Hell Sentenced to 18 Years
I always thought that this would be possible in theory and someone actually managed to pull this off and got caught. From what I know, we do not have high profile cases like this in Singapore yet, but can definitely learn from such cases.
Shared by Andre Ng, First Mate of Div0.