14 DAY TRIAL // This may sound sad, but it's true, and the law never cares why hackers do what they do, as long as they commit a crime. Sure, we all like Robin Hood, but he was an outlaw and this hacker is as well, even though he had a noble purpose.
Robert Moore is a 23-year-old man from Spokane, Washington. According to itWorldCanada, he was sentenced for 2 years in federal prison and fined $150.000 for breaking into VOIP networks and stealing one million dollars worth of voice minutes.
How did he get in such troubles? Well, at the beginning, More was working for Edwin Pena, the second culprit as a software developer. He was making all sorts of programs that were meant to test Edwin's own network. Later on, he discovered that Pena was up to no good, but he couldn't drop the job, as he needed the money to pay medical bills for his parents that had cancer and lupus, as seen on the same site. Well, this is all very sad, but the law is the law.
As security expert Dan York has stated for itWorldCanada, the man's attacks were not something very complicated nor hard to avoid. Simple measures such as closing idle ports could reduce the risk of such attacks. So, he wasn't such a threat after all, since basic security techniques could have foiled his tactics, according to York. This all just proves to me that some people are getting hacked not so much because of security flaws but because of their lack of interest in defending themselves.
What Robert actually did was running attacks against Cisco XM routers and Quintum Tenor VGs, by brute force via a software that he himself created. But this is not all, as he also did something similar to service provider nets, attacking to find prefixes and he also scanned corporations' Internet Protocol addresses that might have had flaws he could exploit.