After one year and many millions spent, genius hacker is caught by the police

Jun 30, 2008 07:41 GMT  ·  By

If you are interested in hacking news, then you must know about 20 years old hacker MaddoxX - the guy managed, one year ago, to hack a third party Valve file server called Steam Cyber Cafe and posted online an archived file that included credit card numbers, transaction amounts, the company's supposed bank balance, and data that allowed the creation of cyber cafe certificates - which means some really nasty things.

"We also don't want money from VALVe," he wrote on the No-Steam forum last year, according to website Shacknews. "We want a simple message on their site." However, the website's administration had a different reaction than the one anticipated by MaddoxX: they have created an email address meant to encourage citizens to help the authorities track him down. We don't know if that specific e-mail was the reason he got caught (actually, we really doubt it had anything to do with it).

But the guy did not stop there - he also hacked an Activision website and downloaded an early version of Enemy Territory: Quake wars but did not leak the game (according to reports, this would've cost the developers $25 million). He also stole credit card data from an English ticket site (no less than 50,000 credit cards) and, according to the police, spent about 13 million Euros playing online poker and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players. Stuff he probably sold after the purchase.

But, as it usually happens in such cases, MaddoxX was eventually caught by the Dutch police in the small town of Maastricht (a police unit called Team High Tech Crime). It is unclear at the moment what will happen to the 20 years old teen, but the future doesn't look too bright: he hacked two major websites and spent way too many millions of euros - that were not his.