America’s most wanted cyber criminal was undone by his password.
Jeremy Hammond, 29, made it his mission to hack into US government websites to “expose and confront injustice”.
But at home the super-hacker set his password as “Chewy123”, Chewy being the name of his pet puss.
By his own admission, the password was “really weak”.
Agents armed with assault rifles raided his house in 2012 and he just managed to shut down his encrypted laptop.
But the casual password made it simple for FBI detectives to crack the encryption programme and access the stored information.
He was convicted in 2013 of hacking into a US security think tank called Stratfor, which does work for the US Defence Department and the Homeland Security Department.
Federal prosecutors said the Stratfor hack resulted in more than a million dollars in losses to individuals.
Comments
Totally missing the point that so often it is the regulators that detect the problem and enforce punishment. Which is totally absent still in Portugal.
Think of Isaltino Morais- the dodgy autocrat whose defence imagined dozens of what are now known in Portuguese legalese as 'Isaltino's. Constant appeals about everything and nothing to succesfully delay final judgement and punishment.
But amongst many thousands of differences - not least the vast gap in social development - is how the respective governments make alterations to their offical government websites.
The UK have a statement - Is there anything wrong with this page? Help us improve GOV.UK - such as at : https://www.gov.uk/browse/benefits
The Portuguese ? Changes are regularly made to http://www.portugal.gov.pt/pt.aspx ... by the Portuguese branch of the hacker group Anonymous!!!