14 DAY TRIAL // Jesse William McGraw, a security guard at the Carrell Clinic in Dallas, Texas, has been charged with computer intrusion after he took his passion for spy movies to another level – actually making one during his night shifts. The misguided hacker filmed himself installing a botnet client on hospital computers while wearing a hoodie and with the Mission Impossible soundtrack playing in the background.
According to the authorities, in his daily life, Jesse William McGraw is not just a spy wannabe, but a full-blown cyber-criminal, going by the online handles of "GhostExodus" and "PhantomExodizzmo." He and his hacker crew, called the "Electronik Tribulation Army," are allegedly responsible for compromising computers belonging to the Dallas Police or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
McGraw posted the video of him installing malware on the hospital's computers on YouTube, describing his action as an infiltration mission into the offices of a large corporation. The hacker made efforts to hide his identity from the camera, but failed to do so on several occasions. Furthermore, he boasted about these "feats" on forums and his online journal.
Apparently, McGraw did not install malware on a single computer at the clinic for the sake of his movies, but literally riddled the place with botnet clients, which he planned on using to launch a distributed denial of service attack. The DDoS was supposed to start on July 4, which he called "Devil's Day."
His plans were spoiled by a fellow hacker, calling himself XXxxImmortalxxXX, who bragged about hacking into the Carrell Clinic to Wesley McGrew, a security researcher and graduate student at Mississippi State University. It didn't take McGrew long to realize that XXxxImmortalxxXX wasn't the real author of the crimes and traced them back to GhostExodus.
The researcher took the evidence he had to the authorities, who subsequently arrested Jesse William McGraw. "He's a security guard at the hospital, but he's pretending to infiltrate a corporate office and he's running around with a hoodie on over his security guard uniform and installing botnet software on a hospital computer all to the Mission Impossible music. [You] can't make this stuff up," Wesley McGrew commented for Network World.