“Perverted Justice” an amazing tale of entrapment, hacking, revenge and pedophiles

Yesterday a New Jersey judge sentenced a hacker for launching a revengeful distributed denial of service attack on websites which hosted a news story that humiliated him. It is truly an amazing true sad story.

The hacker worked for an organization whose members posed as children to trap pedophiles on the Internet. Shortly after, the hacker fell out with the founder of the organization who he allegedly accused of having used his son's photograph as bait. Their relationship became bitter. The founder then posed as a fictitious online woman and started courting the hacker. The hacker was entrapped and in love. During the course of the relationship he shared incriminating pictures of himself. Later the hacker flew down to meet the online woman in real life. Standing in wait at the airport with flowers in hand for the woman who did not appear, the hacker was secretly photographed. These photographs along with transcript of his email exchanges were made public to humiliate him. His wife divorced him and he lost contact with his son. The hacker reacted in revenge, infecting computers with bots and launching a denial of service attack on websites that carried the story. He was caught and sentenced to imprisonment for two years.

The story serves to demonstrate how a fictitious identity created on the Internet can be used to entrap people. I warned readers in my post “Online temptation the art of using search engines to honey trap businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats and military officials?” how easy it was to entrap. My post “3G,Cell Phones, Social Networking and the not so Innocent Obsession” demonstrates how harmful sharing of personal snaps online can be. The last and most important message is that taking law into your own hands is not the most advisable thing to do.

Read the news story "Perverted Justice vigilante sentenced for DDoS attacks"