Case study of a specific cybercrime

¶ … Comcast Hackers

The internet has made access to information remarkably easier for billions of people. Unfortunately, with this ease of access also comes a greater likelihood of cyber crime. One incident of cyber crime that recently made headlines was the so-called "Comcast Hacker Case." In this incident, two young men named Christopher Allen Lewis (age 20) and Michael Paul Nebel (age 28) along with co-defendant James Robert Black, Jr., hacked into the website of Comcast at www.comcast.net and redirected traffic to their own website. The incident took place in May of 2008, but the sentencing just occurred in September, 2010 ("Comcast Hackers," 2010).

The defendants went by cyber nicknames, which is a common occurrence in hacker situations. Christopher Allen Lewis of Newark, Delaware called himself "EBK." Michael Paul Nebel of Kalamazoo, Michigan called himself "slacker," and their co-conspirator James Robert Black, Jr. went by "defiant." Collectively, this group of hackers had labeled themselves Kryogeniks ("Comcast Hackers," 2010).

In directing over 5 million Comcast customers to their Kryogeniks website, customers were unable to read or listen to their mail. Instead, they were greeted with the message "KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBB RoXed COMCAST sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven." The cost to Comcast for this stunt/crime was approximately $90,000.00. Not surprisingly, the FBI got involved in the matter and criminal charges were filed ("Comcast Hackers," 2010).

Lewis and Nevel, both of whom pled guilty to conspiring to disrupt service at Comcast's website, were sentenced in on September 24, 2010 to 18 months in prison. In addition, they were ordered to pay Comcast back for the estimated $89,578.13 that they lost due to this crime. Their co-conspirator, Black was only sentenced to four months in prison after his case was transferred to the Western District of Washington, but he was also ordered contribute to the restitution payments ("Comcast Hackers," 2010).

The way these hackers pulled off their crime was that they gained control of the domain by phone and sent a hacked e-mail from a Comcast account to Network Solutions (Comcast's domain registrar). This allowed them to gain control of 200 Comcast domains. According to Poulson (2009) "In an interview the day after the attack, Defiant and EBK told Wired magazine's Threat Level that they didn't initially set out to redirect the site's traffic. Instead, they merely changed the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used a false address using crass language" (p. 1). Whether they intended to redirect traffic and shut down Comcast for 5 hours or not, the result was devastating to Comcast nonetheless.

So what was the motive behind this cyber crime? Apparently it was a "ego" crime, which expanded into what some would call a "revenge" crime. According to Poulson (2009) the men called the Comcast manager at home to brag about what they had accomplished. However the manager did not give them the reaction they had hoped for. Instead he "scoffed at their claim" and ended up hanging up on them. Angry and insulted by this reaction, they men decided "to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site's traffic to servers under the hackers' control" (Poulson, 2009, p. 1).

There has been some speculation that the attack was motivated by Comcast's reported sabotage of BitTorrent traffic, however the defendants denied that this was the case. In fact, according to Poulsen (2008), their explanation for the attack was that "they just hate Comcast in general." Defiant sarcastically quipped, "I'm sure they hate us too."

This seems to be a case of some mischievous young men getting in way over their heads and not realizing how serious the consequences of their actions would be. Early on in the investigation, they were apparently laughing about the incident and enjoying their stint in the media spotlight (Poulsen, 2008). Now that they have been sentenced to serious jail time and are forced to pay major restitution, the seriousness of their crime has undoubtedly begun to sink in.

While there was no new legislation specifically attached to the Comcast incident, crimes such as this demonstrate that computer security is an enormously difficult problem for which no simple solution exists. Obviously there are differences between detecting an intrusion attack and preventing one from occurring in the first place. Preventative measures are obviously more helpful and less complicated, however with new intrusion techniques cropping up all the time, it is virtually impossible to predict exactly what needs to be secured and it what fashion.

Some people claim that the government needs to step and in do more to combat computer viruses, because not only can they halt the operations of businesses like Comcast, which slows the economy, but they could potentially wreak havoc on the government itself. The 2007 movie "Live Free or Die Hard" illustrated just how vulnerable our entire society is an environment run almost exclusively by electronics. Anyone with a great deal of computer savvy and the wrong intentions could potentially bring our world to halt. The Comcast incident is merely one of the many symptoms of the potential for mass destruction that professional hackers are capable of invoking.

While the scenario portrayed in Die Hard 4 was somewhat extreme, computer security breaches happen every day, ranging from annoying spam email directed at an individual, to intrusion attacks designed to infiltrate computer networks to gain access to sensitive and confidential data. The number of attacks against corporations, as well as the government, continues to increase despite the plethora of measures continuously devised to combat intrusion.