It seems life is getting hard for global hackers of the ‘Anonymous’ group which called for attack on Israeli cyberspace on April 7th this year. Two alleged members of the group from Cambodia were arrested last week. Last year FBI claimed that it had dismantled the leaders of ‘Anonymous’ according to a story filed by Huffington Post. On Tuesday, federal investigators announced that an alleged member of the group, Fidel Salinas, has received a second superseding indictment from a federal grand jury which adds 18 counts of cyberstalking and attempted computer hacking charges.
The 27 year old Salinas is from Donna, Texas, and faces 44 charges of cyber assault in total with each one of them punishable for a maximum of 10 years that could end him up behind the bars for 440 years. Last October, he was found guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for trying to hack the computer system of Hidalgo County.
“Court documents allege that between the late night and early morning of January 4-5, 2012, Salinas made more than 14,000 hacking attempts to the administration management page of the Hidalgo County website server, resulting in true administrators temporarily not being able to access it. The county allegedly incurred a loss of more than $10,000 in responding to the attack.”
Salinas is also accused of cyberstalking a female for at least 18 times according to the statement issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Texas.
“According to the allegations, between December 23-29, 2011, Salinas had the intent to harass and intimidate a female victim. Allegedly, he repeatedly e-mailed her, attempted to gain unauthorized access to her website, made submissions through a contact form on that site, and tried to open user accounts without her consent.”
“The indictment lists his alleged attempts to stalk her and hack into her website. According to the indictment, he repeatedly did so late at night and early in the morning, with his stalking attempts or messages sometimes occurring less than one minute apart from each other. He allegedly did so as part of a conspiracy or agreement with at least one other person, according to the charges.”
He also tried to hack the computer systems of La Joya Independent School District and a local newspaper, McAllen The Monitor. The document states that he is a member of hacking group ‘Anonymous’ which is just a chat room according to Salinas attorney.
“Salinas allegedly participated in an online chat room for the Operation Anti-Security faction of Anonymous and attempted to enter the IRC Operations server for Anonymous. According to the charges, after his alleged attempt to hack his way into the Hidalgo County web server, he posted a profanity-laced rant on his Facebook page that ended with a quote used by Anonymous members: “We do not forgive, we do not forget, divide by zero we fall, expect us.””
No comments:
Post a Comment