Goastse Hacker Who Hacked 110K AT&T iPad Customers Sentenced To 41 Months

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800px-Weevilicious

Back in 2010, a team of hackers who went under the group handle Goatse Security exploited a hole in AT&T’s website to steal over a hundred thousand iPad subscribers’ email addresses.

The first of the pair, Daniel Spitlier, plead guilty to the attack back in 2011, bringing him a 12-18 month maximum sentence.

His partner, though, hasn’t gotten off nearly as easily: Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer has just been sentenced to forty-one months.

The sentencing follows Auernheimer being found guilty on one county of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization back in November of last year.

Auernheimer apparently made quite a show of the sentencing:

Before his sentencing, Auernheimer held a press conference on the courthouse steps, where he read John Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion and told the assembled crowd, “I’m going to jail for doing arithmetic.” Just prior to the judge’s reading of the sentence, Auernheimer was cuffed by agents in a struggle over his tablet. Under the terms of his pre-sentence parole, Auernheimer was unable to use a computer with a keyboard. Asked for the device, Auernheimer tried to hand it to attorney Tor Ekeland, and was returned to the courtroom five minutes later in shackles.

Auernheimer was an outspoken character who has consistently tried to play the part of victim in this case, but his actions have always seemed more like standard anarchy raze-and-burn behavior than ethical hackery: for example, Auernheimer at the time of the hacks admitted he never even tried to alert AT&T to the vulnerability he had exploited before leaking customers’ details into the wild. Pretty shady.

Source: Auernheimer

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