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The Most Notorious Cybercrooks Of 2011 -- And How They Got Caught

A torrent of attacks from groups like Anonymous, LulzSec, Goatse Security, and Antisec has made it a busy year for cybercrime investigators

Dec 07, 2011 | 09:11 PM | 

By Ericka Chickowski, Contributing Editor
Dark Reading

While there are plenty of elusive hackers that will forever manage to outrun the law, the good guys scored some impressive arrests, indictments, and convictions in 2011. Here are some of the highest profile cases to hit the headlines this year.

1. Anonymous and LulzSec Hacker: Ryan Cleary
Police raided the home of 19-year-old Brit Ryan Cleary and arrested him this summer for allegedly using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to take down the British Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) website this year, plus websites for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry the British Phonographic Industry last year. His arrest was heralded by authorities as part of a crackdown against LulzSec, but the loosely organized group associated with Anonymous disavowed him as its leader. Cleary for sure had some affiliation with Anonymous, though. Acrimony between him and other Anonymous members for hacking into the group's AnonOps website and exposing its members IP addresses led to Anonymous exposing Cleary's full name, address, phone number, and IP on its site. These details were used by authorities to eventually find, arrest, and indict him.

2. Ivy League Academic Content Turbo Downloader: Aaron Swartz
A programmer and fellow at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics, 24-year-old Aaron Swartz faced indictment this year after he downloaded more than 4 million academic articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network connection to Jstor, an online academic repository. Swartz used anonymous log-ins on the network in September 2010 and actively worked to mask his log-ins when MIT and Jstor tried to stop the massive drain of copyrighted material. After Jstor shut down access to its database from the entire MIT network, Swartz visited the campus and directly plugged in a laptop the infrastructure at an MIT networking room and left it hidden there as it downloaded more content. It was this visit in the flesh that got him nabbed; authorities had been tipped off by an IT admin about the laptop and after searching the laptop left it there along with a hidden webcam to catch Swartz when he came back for his computer. But not everyone thought his actions were criminal.

3. DNSchanger Creators: Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin Poltev and Anton Ivanvov
In a cybercrime bust that some security pros called one of the biggest ever, the six masterminds behind the DNSchanger malware were arrested in November for operating one of the longest running and most costly botnets to afflict the Internet. Lead by Tsastsin, this gang of thieves is accused of developing the DNSchanger malware to help perpetrate a profitable clickjacking scheme that netted it $14 million in stolen advertising views. The malware pioneered the method of using social engineering techniques to deliver unobtrusive payloads used to hijack victims' DNS settings in order to set up revenue streams based on their manipulated browsing. Law enforcement closed in on the takedown after a multiyear, public-private investigation it dubbed "Operation Ghost Click," which was initiated nearly five years ago after researchers with Trend Micro brought the gang's botnet to the attention of the Feds.

4. Sony Hacker: Cody Kretsinger
This September, authorities detained and indicted Cody Kretsinger (a.k.a. "recursion") for allegedly carrying out the summer attack against Sony Pictures on behalf of LulzSec. Authorities apparently hunted down Kretsinger through the U.K.-based HideMyAss proxy server service provider he used to help him "anonymously" carry out his SQL injection attack against Sony. The provider coughed up the logs to the authorities that allowed them to match time-stamps with IP addresses to pinpoint Kretsinger as the suspect in question.

Next Page: Anonymous' inside man at AT&T

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