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Accidentally including your exact location in message taunting the police is failing about as hard as possible without actually qualifying for a Darwin Award.
An alleged member of Anonymous has been tracked down after he posted a picture of his scantily clad girlfriend in an image bragging about his hacking exploits. Higinio O. Ochoa III from Texas has been charged hacking into the websites of at least four US law enforcement agencies before, in one case at least, posting personal …
It occurs to me that they might have a large database of less than anonymous people that they are monitoring through more sophisticated means they don't wish to make public, and they just wait until one of them makes a mistake like this to grab them with some evidence they are happy to make public in the law courts.
As conspiracy theories go, that's not too far fetched. On the other hand, having hung out with people who for one reason or another want to stay anonymous, I'm well aware of just how many ways there are to slip up, especially if you have a consistent pseudonym. And given we're dealing with the kind of person who can't spell "come at me" or "bitches" correctly I have no particular reason to think the feds needed extra help tracking him down.
Good one. Now that you've mastered sarcasm, try mastering the caps lock key. Then read the story again and realise the guy lives in Texas and has a "girlfriend" in Sydney. Then look up the difference between "their" and "there". Then you're ready to move on to punctuation, such as the apostrophe, comma and question mark.
Then, with luck and a lot of concentration, we can get you wearing big boy pants and stop you having those accidents.
Can't quite beat the expertise of the "hacker" that takes the photos with a device known to add the GPS coordinates and even tells you on screen it's using the GPS. Then you edit it in your no doubt cracked version of photoshop, as I doubt you spunked a grand on software, before saving it without minimising or checking what metadata has been embedded and posting it as a two finger salute to law enforcement. Geez there's some fucking stupid people out there.
At first I thought he must be innocent seeing as he had a girlfriend! Then I realised he was in Texas and she was in Melbourne, Australia - cyber-girlfriend! The law of cyberdorks and natural unselection is still maintained. I'm guessing the "ample" bit means she was a fat cyber-girlfriend too?
ls | xargs jhead -purejpg
or
find ./folder_of_images -name '*.jpg' | xargs mogrify -strip
I'm sure there are ways to do the same in windows, but I cannot be bothered to look. I 'clean' any images that I post to the web regardless if they're personal or not. It's a bunch of personal information that other people would rarely need, and if you're kicking the law enforcement lion in the balls, it will come back to bite you.
Right-click -> Properties -> Details -> Remove Properties and Personal Information.
Or the easier thing to do is to not try and hack the very people that would be kicking down your door. Of course the kiddies of 4chan have never been accused of having too much common sense.
"A review of log files from the Texas DPS website revealed that it had been compromised on February 8 ... utilising a SQL injection vulnerability ..."
The Texas Department of Public Safety can't even look after their own safety. How long have SQL injection vulnerabilities been widely known about, understood and fix measures been available?
Yes, embarrassing, but not surprising. The bar is actually quite low.
Whilst most government sites are probably no less secure than the average, there are a lot of them. (Governments are fairly large sprawling entities and every country has one.) It is inevitable that some will be wide open. If you go to a large multi-storey carpark on a Saturday morning and systematically try *every* car, I'm sure you will find that some of them are unlocked. (*) The only difference with web-sites is that the web-site search can be automated and probably isn't covered by the cyber equivalent of CCTV.
(* At least, you would have done in years gone by. I think at least some modern cars have a preference for automatically locking themselves if the key(s) drift too far away. Human nature remains as fallible as ever, but the common failure mode has been identified and engineered away. If only there was such a thing for SQL injections.)
I know you can usually turn the option off which stores location information in your pictures. However, I noticed that my Winphone has a second option: it can automatically remove said location info again as soon as you put a picture online (social media, skydrive, etc.).
As such this leaves me wondering if the other platforms don't have an option such as this ?
Are you sure it works?
Or does it re-encode the data and hide it in the picture itself while sending a message to the MIBs that you are trying to hide your location/personal info?
Its a closed source app, you can't check the code to be sure.
Mines the one with the foil lining and matching hat.
Or it didn't happen, as the saying goes.
Sorry for 2 posts quickly after another; but if the fellow geeks want to actually see the picture themselves they should check out this article (link) on the Daily Mail website.
C'mon El Reg, why didn't you post this important piece of evidence as well? ;-)