Australian Hacking Sting Backfires

A sting operation led by Australian federal police against a well-known hacking ring ended in embarrassment after the police computer system was hacked by the very cybercriminals they’d aimed to wipe out, according the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aussie police reported on the TV show Four Corners that they had infiltrated the hacking forum r00t-you.org, which has about 5,000 members, by tracking hackers logging in to the site and then raiding the Melbourne home of the site’s administrator. Police had logged into the r00t-you.org forum as the administrator to gather information about other cybercriminals, and told the TV program that they had gained access “fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration.”

What the police didn’t realize, though, was that they had failed to set a password on their own database application.

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