Not Anonymous This Time: 15 Year Old Austrian Boy Arrested For Hacking 259 Businesses

Austrian officials admit they are still investigating and totaling up the damage however as it stands 15-year-old who goes by the hacker handle ACK!3STX has been arrested, and so far charged with hacking over 259 businesses.

The damage includes stealing data from businesses and publicly posting it, defacing company websites, and of course breaking security infrastructures. There was no specific target. The young hacker hacked everything sports sites, travel sites, tourism sites, adult sites and more, reports ZDNet.

The Austria Federal Criminal Police Office reported that as soon as the boy was questioned he admitted to the attacks. All of the hacking happened between January of 2012 and March of 2012. He said he was bored and wanted to prove himself, and proving himself is exactly what he did. He found a hacker forum that gave points for successful hacks, after three months he was in the top 50 out of 2,000 hackers registered on the forum.

At some point the young man either forgot to use anonymizing software or his anonymizing software failed him and his IP address was traced back to his residence in Lower Austria. From there authorities were able to get a search warrant and track him down.

The investigation is on going and its also been reported that Europol is trying to determine the number of attacks in both Austria and abroad. The hacker’s real name was withheld because of his age.

source: ZD Net
image courtesy of ZDNet via Sebastian Gruber

Hackers Get 181,000 Medicaid Records And 25,000 SSNs From Utah Department Of Health.

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On March 30th hackers believed to have been from Eastern Europe, hacked into a vulnerable server within Utah’s Department Of Health.  UDOH has said that records were moved to a new server that had a configuration problem which allowed hackers to circumvent the department’s security protocols.

Although the breach occurred on March 30th UDOH waited until last Wednesday to publicly announce that the breach occurred. On Friday they revealed the damage.  Hackers made off with 24,000 files. Each file can contain information on hundreds of Medicaid patients.  UDOH tallied up all the damage and said that 181,000 patients have had information compromised. 

The information that was taken includes patient names, birth dates, addresses, provider information, procedure codes answer social security numbers.  The patients affected ranged from children kn Utah’s CHIP program to senior citizens.

More after the break

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