Dear Ex-Client

[MoonCat]

Brings a tear of joy to my eye *sniff*

[taxguykarl]

Glad to see you at least got to keep some payment.

[Seshat]

Important life lesson:

If you are not a computing professional yourself, do not try to crack, spam, DOS-attack, or otherwise technically inconvenience a computing professional. We'll always win. Always.

And sometimes we won't bother to use a computer to do it. We'll go straight to the criminal authorities. WE know which attacks are legally considered criminal.

[Seraph]

Important life lesson:

If you are not a computing professional yourself, do not try to crack, spam, DOS-attack, or otherwise technically inconvenience a computing professional. We'll always win. Always.

And sometimes we won't bother to use a computer to do it. We'll go straight to the criminal authorities. WE know which attacks are legally considered criminal.

Oh you wanna know the best part? He has NO IDEA how to actually pull off these things!! He's been purchasing the services off shady websites.... with his OWN credit card and personal PayPal. He's such a newb that he can't pull off a real attack, so he goes to these websites and just pays for, like, 1 day of DDOSing, or 25k emails sent to me. So yeah, he's massively traceable now, and to boot he's been using his own personal email to specifically let me know its him doing it. He didn't even use a proxy, I got his IP straight off the emails and it traced directly to his house.

Dumbest "hacker" ever.

[Seshat]

Okay. Stories of dumb 'hackers'.

My husband was the good friend of the sysadmin at a university. He was chatting with the sysadmin when one of the bits of monitoring software started giving an alert. There was a cracking attempt going on.

Sysadmin and husband went to work. (husband was a GOOD friend, and also a sysadmin.)

It only took a few minutes, perhaps not even that, to locate the would-be hacker's computer. Sysadmin called up a friend from the local cop shop. Husband kept watch on the "hacker"'s activities.

Once the cop arrived, the three of them walked down the hall, into a student computer lab, and stood behind a particular chair, watching the screen. The would-be hacker didn't even try to run. Cop got an eyeful, enough to make an immediate arrest.

Cop also got the log from the monitoring.

[Akasa]

Seriously? Hack into the school from the school computer lab? That's dumb, so is buying the hacking services like this guy is.

[Seraph]

I would've paid to see that "hacker's" face when they finally turned around and realized why they were being watched.

[Kristev]

That I would have loved to see.

[Seshat]

Seriously? Hack into the school from the school computer lab? That's dumb, so is buying the hacking services like this guy is.

I know!

And yes, his face was priceless. I seem to recall him getting some appropriate 'can't be near a computer for X months' sentence, too. Which pretty much screwed his planned degree, at least for that term.

[Marmalady]

*nods* A lot of people who are new to computers are so taken with the idea of a 'virtual' world - they don't seem to realise that they can leave a very real trail behind them.

Even something as simple as not deleting browser history can land you in hot water, as my ex found out when I saw he'd been visiting certain kinds of website (the kind where people go with the express purpose of meeting up to play Hide the Sausage)

[Nemesis44UK]

That is all kinds of awesome sauce.

Well done sir. Reminds me a little bit of a news story from a while back where there are a couple of guys in line at McDonalds and this drunk guy hits one of them. Well, those guys were marines and they righteously schooled that young man!

Talk about picking on the wrong person

[Seraph]

Small update.

-----
Hello Seraph, sorry for the late response, we investigated the issue on the 15th, and terminated a client who was email spamming from our shared server. You should not see anymore issues.

If you do, contact me directly.

<email redacted>



Thank you.

[Dreamstalker]

You are full of WIN. Even my mom was laughing at the wannabe "hacker" and she's not really a computer person. I'd pay to be a fly on the wall when he realizes he's been banned (and possibly has authorities at his door).

"World's Dumbest" really need a computer-user segment...

If you are not a computing professional yourself, do not try to crack, spam, DOS-attack, or otherwise technically inconvenience a computing professional. We'll always win. Always.

As a friend said: "Never mess with a techie. We can and will hunt you down."

The nutjob of mine from a few months back thought he'd get cute by signing me up for online dating. The email that the site sent me logged the IP address of the original request. A very well-known disability center, and I was able to pin down a specific computer.
5 seconds with a trace tool + center that fiercely defends its reputation + evidence of a client using their computers for what could be considered stalking/harassment...I didn't hear back from them, but it might be safe to say he's been banned from there. Now I'm just waiting for him to do something stupid which results in my finding his home address.