by Rob Douglas

“From his home in Worcester, he called 911 in Seattle and Georgia, reporting nonexistent crimes that resulted in SWAT teams being dispatched.

“He used stolen credit card numbers to shop online, at one point buying a Sony PlayStation 3. He hacked into computer networks at major companies, stealing information and wreaking havoc.

“For a teenager, he caused a lot of damage.”

So begins a piece at The Boston Globe titled Teen Pleads Guilty to Hacking Spree about an unnamed 17 year-old only known as “Dshocker” who for the past three years has hacked his way through corporate America.

As the Boston Globe reports, based upon a federal indictment of Dshocker:

“From November 2005 to January 2008 he had controlled “botnets,” networks of thousands of computers infected with a malicious software code, according to the indictment. Using the Internet to control the botnets without the knowledge of the machines’ owners, he would perform attacks on other computers with the aid of a control server that would command thousands of infected machines to flood other networks with requests, causing them to crash.

“Dshocker obtained stolen credit card numbers and purchased items over the Internet. To evade arousing suspicion of credit card companies, he had packages sent to the homes of the card holders whose identities he had stolen. But before the packages arrived at their destinations, a confederate who worked at a major shipping company would reroute the packages to Dshocker’s home, the indictment said.

“From January 2008 to May 2008, he made 911 calls to police departments across the country, reporting bomb threats or that an armed gunman was at a school – hoaxes known as “swatting.” To disguise his identity on those calls, he used a process of fooling caller identification equipment with stolen names and phone numbers, known as caller ID spoofing, the indictment said. He obtained addresses and phone numbers for the hoax by hacking into the records of Internet service providers.

“Court records said he gained access to corporate computer systems, including the networks of Charter Communications, Road Runner, and Comcast, and would steal information about customers. In one case, he obtained information about software from an unidentified large electronics company and used those data to modify his own cable modem to get free Internet access.”

Reports like this lead to only one conclusion.  Much of corporate America is incapable of preventing data theft and identity theft.