How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy | Hacker News Reader

How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy

wired.co.uk

44 pointsr0h1n52 comments

The question to ask yourself when reading this article is... "Why the hell is there a Miss Teen USA competition?"

The competitors of Miss Tween, Miss Pre-Teen, and Little Miss America need a competition to move into?

Child beauty pageants is a reasonable amount of money. $20bn according to WP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_beauty_pageant)

Even if ethically dubious...

There are far worst things happening in the UK though. It's becoming a career decision to neglect your children so you can claim special needs status and therefore disability benefit (and celebrity status on FaceBook amongst peers).

I don't really see how that's similar in any way at all, and it seems like you're trying to inject a pet hate into the conversation.

Oh dear...

> It's becoming a career decision to neglect your children so you can claim special needs status and therefore disability benefit (and celebrity status on FaceBook amongst peers).

This is a hateful stigmatising lie.

Citation needed.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_p...

Why the hell can't a 19 year old woman decide to enter a beauty pageant? There are all sorts of contests for all sorts of people, this one just happens to be for beautiful ones.

I didn't question this particular woman or her rights to do what she wants in any way (including her decision to enter this competition).

Then I'm not sure what you're looking for. What does it say about our society except that we like pretty girls and the contestants like the competition?

For one, "How the FBI found a beautiful adult woman's webcam spy" wouldn't sound equally perverted.

To which I can only answer, "Why are there Monte Carlo nights at volunteer fire departments?" It's just one of those things Americans have. Nor is it an innovation: I knew someone who competed in this 40 years ago.

If you want to move the the US, it will take you five years to become a citizen, and another seven before you can run for senate. If you wish to run on a program of abolishing Miss Teen USA (which of course the senate has no power to do), sure, I'll vote for you. But you might find other matters more pressing.

Out of all the possible questions, why is that the one we should be asking?

That seems a bit to 'she was asking for it' for my liking.

No, I was in no way implying that she was asking for it. There's no 'blame the victim' from me. I'm glad the person who did this was caught.

I dislike the existence of beauty competitions that are aimed at children. Miss Teen USA is aimed at ages 15 to 19.

> I dislike the existence of beauty competitions that are aimed at children. Miss Teen USA is aimed at ages 15 to 19.

To me this sounds like you are defending Miss Teen USA, but I know that's not your point. To make your position clear, you should explain why you believe 15-19 year olds are children who are not capable of making the decision to enter a beauty competition.

To be clear: people in that age range are engaging in all sorts of competitions, from sports to academics, and they are given all sorts of responsibilities and privileges such as holding jobs, driving cars, having sex, choosing a career path or course of study, enlisting in the military (or ROTC), etc., so why is this one category of competition/activity so egregious and inappropriate?

Old enough to join the military, too young to be in a beauty competition. /apparently

If this is your take away from this article, you need to have your compassion module re-calibrated. ;)

I don't understand this response. What am I not being compassionate about? I am _in no way_ implying that the victim did something wrong in any way whatsoever.

The article mentions guiltless teenagers/children being coerced into submitting sexually (performing webcam shows doing whatever he asks) to an unseen attacker under the threat of public humiliation, and your response is 'huh teen beauty pageants are stupid.' Remarking off-handedly only on this and nothing else suggests that the rest isn't interesting or isn't that big a deal- I'm taking exception to this attitude.

It's like if someone were kidnapped in Key West and you wrote "ugh everything is so overpriced there." It's excessively flippant.

I can't believe this idiot was sending the data back to a .no-ip.org domain. Aside from the fact that he did some pretty awful stuff to a lot of girls and deserves to be jailed, how could you be so proficient in web camera hacking, frequent so many hacking forums, and still not know to send the data back to a domain that can't be linked DIRECTLY to your home machine?

He isn't proficient in web camera hacking. He managed to install someone else's tool on someone else's computer. He didn't write the RAT I bet. There isn't much hacking in this story at all, the guy just got lucky that he managed to get Miss Teen USA's computer.

Seeing how it turned out, I'd say he was rather unlucky that he got Miss Teen USA's computer.

Little bastard could use some jail time.

Admittedly, this article changed my understanding - for better or worse I confess my first thoughts in hearing all this was that it was someone she was "sexting" with, he discovered the competition aspect, blackmailed... and the whole "webcam hacked" was the excuse.

Why are the camera lights controlled by software? I would rather they come on when the camera gets powered up, ie. controlled by hardware.

I would like that too, but my solution is to not trust the camera and have a sticker over it which I can remove when I want.

There work well because they have a sticky portion and a part that has no adhesive: http://www.post-it.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Post_It/Global/Pr...

The view from my camera with the sticker on is: http://i.imgur.com/y0OKxqO.jpg

At least on MacBook Pro computers, you can use a thin magnetic strip to cover the camera. My friend was making these by hand, and never got around to the kickstarter :)

AFAIK, MacBook cameras can't be used without the light turning on. [0]

[0] http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/26590/are-there-pri...

I also do this except I'm using a bandaid, it works well and is good conversation starter.

My solution is to be a moderately unattractive male with facial hair, lead a boring life, and keep my clothes on when in front of my computer (although the later is probably a mitigating factor).

Does being overweight male with excessive facial and body hair, wearing nothing but underpants counts as black ICE?

Some companies hand these out at tech events: http://digiclean.com/

I got one from constant contact & upon reading this story cut it into strips to cover built-in webcams. Has the same stick/come off properties of the 3m stuff I think & it's fully opaque.

Nothing technically relevant here. Just your regular not-so-clever asshole behind a computer.

It's interesting to note that at least one school system itself has surreptitiously installed this kind of thing on laptops given to students, with the express purpose of monitoring them at home. A student was punished for behavior at home which was only detected by the secret image capture software installed.

So why don't all embedded cameras have hardware indicator lights that can't be disabled?

Didn't that student sue his school and get a settlement for a whole lot of money? I know that doesn't mean there aren't more of these cases but its still illegal.

It's hard to describe the contempt I feel for ratters. I hope the guy gets a nice long jail sentence.

Coercing an under 18 year old (and knowing she was under 18) into providing nude photographs against her will should be prison time.

It's cases like this - where people are rightly disgusted and horrified - that make other cases seem really baffling.

(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/webcam-scandal-resu...)

> A suburban Philadelphia school district embroiled in a webcam spy scandal was hit Tuesday with new allegations that a student-issued laptop secretly recorded more than 8,000 images.

> The latest accusations, which were said to occur during a six-month period ending September 2008, has left the high school student “shocked, humiliated and severely emotionally distressed,” (.pdf) according to a federal invasion-of-privacy lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages.

> As part of an FBI investigation and a lawsuit brought by a different student, a judge had contacted the boy’s parents informing him of the breach, and invited them to view the pictures. The youth’s parents were shown 4,404 webcam photographs and 3,978 screenshots captured with the Lower Merion School District–issued MacBook.

Who the hell thought that could ever possibly be a good idea?

School districts have an enormous sense of entitlement. These are the same people who put zero tolerance disciplinary policies in place.

Two considerations: 1) a real genius, using VPN for sending email and then using his own IP for remote back connection from the infected clients 2) why FBI went to FB to search for his name and check who he is, when they could use the dyn-dns logs (or even just do a lookup on the current-at-that-time IP) and ask his ISP who was using that IP address?

Would the FBI need a warrant to get that info from the ISP? If so that's probably why they went the FB route.

Don't they need the same for historical dyn-dns logs and account owner details? And same for warrant for searching his home?

My take away from this article is teach your children about digital security and always keep webcams covered or hardware disabled.* There will always be people willing to do this and it will probably continue to be technically feasible for the foreseeable future (if not "as long as we continue using computers) so preventing it at the demand side isn't realistic.

Children/teens are apparently being digitally raped (I think this is a reasonable description of blackmailing/coercing a teen into doing "what I tell you" over webcam)... it baffles me that we place so low a value on the sort of computer literacy that could prevent this. Hopefully cases like this will cause enough outrage to give hardware producers the kick int he ass they need to fix this issue & alert parents & others to this issue.

* Why the hell don't cameras & mics have hardware switches to turn them off?? Wifi hardware switches are common on laptops now, why doesn't this basic defense covering an obvious, proven attack vector exist??

all these guys thinking connecting to a no logging proxy will protect them. logs show kid connected to vpn and show vpn connected to victim. another evil genius not so genius.

The no-logging VPN was a dead-ended according to the article. His 'sin' was that all of the RATs were connecting back to him directly (via the no-ip dynamic DNS).

Malware was connecting back to an ip, at a household with multiple people. It's hard to arrest an ip. The logs at his university confirmed that he and not anyone else at his household connected to VPN.

Once they had it traced to his household, it was pretty much game over though. Even if they didn't have technical means to determine which family member was using it, I'm sure they could find others.

Using just the information that he used VPN Product A, and the extortionist used VPN Product A doesn't mean anything without other information, and they wouldn't have even found the information that he connected to VPN Product A without having a reason to look into him specifically (vs. any other customer of VPN Product A).

A VPN with no logs will certainly protect you, because there is no way to (logically) connect the machines that connect in to the VPN to activity coming out from the VPN.

>logs show kid connected to vpn and show vpn connected to victim

That only works if you know who the kid is to start with.

Doesn't this count as possession/production of child pornography, under current laws?

Summary: Well, he was an idiot.

This was the easiest way this guy could figure out to see naked women on the internet.

What VPN provider this he use?

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