Article by George Norman

On 27 Mar 2009

Following our recent report on how a couple of 16-year old boys, despite their tender age are genius hackers and security experts – details here – I thought it a good idea to present a couple of stories from the exact opposite spectrum. Here is the story of a would-be iPhone thief Daquan Mathis and the story of suspected Pentagon hacker Eduard Lucian Mandru, a.k.a “Wolfenstein.”

The story of Daquan Mathis is quite a simple one: he robbed the iPhone of one Sayaka Fukuda, a 20 year old shoe designer originally from Tokyo, Japan, currently living in Manhattan, US. He got hold of the woman’s iPhone while she was waiting for the train, and by “got hold” I don’t mean he skillfully snatched it from her purse of pocket, I mean he mugged the poor woman. What do you thing he did once he had the iPhone in his possession?


Sayaka Fukuda explains: “I checked my e-mail and saw something in my outbox. I knew I didn't send anything. opened the attachment, and there he was with his black and red knitted [Spider-Man] hat. The same hat I described to the police officers.” Believe it or not, he took a picture of himself and then sent it to his own email address by using the victim’s email client. It was only a matter of time until the authorities identified and took him into custody.

The story of Eduard Lucian Mandru, better known for his online handle Wolfenstein, is even better. The student from Romania was arrested last week on suspicion that he hacked the US Department of Defense (DOD) systems. Now the interesting thing is that he supposedly did this back in 2006, and did it in such a skillful manner that investigators were left clueless. For years the only lead they had was an email address: “wolfenstein_ingrid@yahoo.com” – so it goes without saying that he is a skilled programmer. Why then did he list the aforementioned email address on his CV and then post the CV on job-seeking websites? Didn’t he realize that would get him caught? Perhaps not!

Graham Cluley from Sophos puts it more bluntly: “In what appears to have been a blunder of extraordinary proportions, Mandru posted his CV on a number of job-seeking websites when looking for employment including - you guessed it - the email address wolfenstein_ingrid@yahoo.com. Judging by the scale of this blunder, if Mandru was the hacker who broke into the Pentagon then he may well be Romania's answer to Homer Simpson.”



Tags: iPhone, Pentagon, DOD, Hacker

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