Russian Hacker Sent To Prison for Stealing Dial-up Passwords

Do you remember those dial-up times? If you do, chances are you still believe that the worst part about dial-up was its speed. Yet today a Russian hacker has discovered that there are things that can be much worse in using dial-up – like going to prison for 2.5 years for stealing other people’s dial-up passwords.

Today the court in a small Russian town has ruled that the guy will now spend 2 and a half years in prison and will also compensate for the damages caused by his activities. The guy stole internet access credentials from other people and used traffic paid by other subscribers of a local ISP. He accessed the web in this manner a total of 283 times and the damages amounted to almost 100 thousand dollars.

61 person lost their logins and passwords to the hacker but they were actually partly guilty themselves as they all rejected an ISP’s professional help in installing and connecting the access equipment and left significant vulnerability. The subscribers only realized something was wrong with their internet bills when one company realized that a huge monthly bill to about 30 thousand dollars for internet access was not something this company could actually use without someone else’s help.

Usually the sentences in such cases are much milder and this is the first time someone is actually sent to jail for stealing internet traffic – mainly because of quite a significant amount in damages. But to me the most astonishing fact about the entire court trial is the fact that the hacker was actually greedy enough to steal dial-up traffic. After all, it could be good enough when we had no better options but committing a crime to be able to access the web at the speed we had at the time? Really, it is more of a torture in itself.

Via (in Russian)