A hacker who stashed a keypress-swiping trojan horse inside a fake Call of Duty hack is going to jail.
20-year-old Lewys Martin of the U.K. is a pretty smart fellow. Smart enough to create a trojan horse virus, distributed through a fake Call of Duty hack, that allowed him to monitor the keyboard activity on infected PCs, giving him access to passwords, credit card numbers and other such information, which he then sold to “crooks and villains” on the internet – but not quite smart enough to avoid being arrested for getting drunk and then trying to steal computer equipment from a couple of nearby colleges.
That arrest led to a raid on his home, where police discovered evidence of his misdoings, including print-outs of more than 300 credit cards and passwords, plus paperwork relating to a fraudulent £3000 [$4700] bank loan. But when he stood for sentencing in November 2011, he asked for – and was given – a deferred sentence so he could take a computer course at university.
Alas, the temptation to be an idiot was too strong to overcome, and in March Martin was arrested along with another criminal mastermind while “smashing their way” – not “breaking,” mind you, but “smashing their way” – into the Walmer Science College in an attempt to steal a computer, projector, hard drive and other equipment.
He’s now been sentenced to 18 months in the slam for burglary and fraud, and even his lawyer seems to think that’s where he should be. “It is clear that he is too clever for his own good and being that clever found it too easy to use that knowledge for nefarious purposes,” attorney Thomas Restell said. He did, however, ask the judge to allow Martin to finish his computer course so he could “harness his abilities for good and not evil.”
The judge said no.
Source: Kent Online
Published: May 17, 2012 09:48 pm