Cyber Law in India, Cyber Law Cases India, Cyber Crime, Fraud Prevention, Phishing, Internet Law, lawyers, Crime advocates, Contact Mr. Vivek Tripathi. What Everybody Ought to Know About Hide. My. Ass. In most instances using a Virtual Private Network VPN is sufficient to hide your real identity while online however as Cody Kretsinger, who was using just this type of service, the UK based company Hide My Ass, had to find out, this might not always be the case. If youve never heard of Hide My Ass VPN, The Guardian suggests its a good option for accessing restricted content, because HMA has the largest server network of all VPN providers. For the record, I do not condone illegal activities using VPN services, nor on the Internet. So lets look at what happened. In September 2. 01. FBI arrested Cody Kretsinger, a 2. Phoenix resident and charged him with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, the Sony Pictures website. According to Reuters, Kretsinger pleaded guilty to both charges and could face up to 1. Country No linebacker in football has accomplished more in the last five years than the Panthers Luke Kuechly pronounced KEEK lee. At Boston College, he led his. ATN Card the World, Everything you Need in internet. Power Of Hacking 6 You would then see something like this 7 Now, type the IP Address of the computer you want to contact and press enter You will see something. Dude please post something for gmail hacking And yes update the link above as none of them work. Reply Delete. Twitter t w t r is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, tweets, restricted to 140 characters. A new W3C standard is slowly creeping into current browser implementations, a standard that will simplify the way people make payments online. ClaimBitcoin is the Bitcoin generator that everyone has been waiting for. Currently it is the only working Bitcoin generator out there, and at the moment it can. Equifax one of the largest providers of consumer credit reporting and other financial services in the US said last night it was the victim of a hack during. I joined Lulz. Sec, your honor, at which point we gained access to the Sony Pictures website., Kretsinger, known online as recursion, told the judge after entering his guilty plea, as reported by Wire. Lulz. Sec was considered a spinoff of Anonymous, a world wide operating group of hacker activists. Earlier, in March 2. FBI had arrested a core member of Lulz. Sec, Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known as sabu, who apparently turned into an informant for the FBI. In June hackers associated with Lulz. Sec, allegedly including Kretsinger, hacked into Sony. Pictures. com and compromised personal information of more than 1 Million users. Sony Pictures had to notify 3. Data provided by http attrition. London based Virtual Private Network provider Hide My Ass HMA appears to have played a vital role in Kretsingers arrest. A leaked IRC chat log revealed that hackers, including Kretsinger aka recursion, boasted about their illegal activities online and used HMA to conceal their identities. Hackers assume fake online identities and go to great length to hide their location and other identifiable details for obvious reasons. It appears that the FBI traced a hack into Sony back to an IP address owned by HMA and promptly got a UK court oder, demanding logs from HMA an incident HMA dubbed the Lulz. Sec Fiasco in a post on their blog on September 2. When leaked IRC chat logs revealed that some Lulz. Sec members used HMA to conceal their identities, HMA didnt take any action they stated on their blog however, later they made it clear that Our VPN service and VPN services in general are not designed to be used to commit illegal activity. It is very naive to think that by paying a subscription fee to a VPN service you are free to break the law without any consequences. They then went on to say that We would also like to clear up some misconceptions about what we do and what we stand for. In 2. 00. 5 we setup HMA primarily as a way to bypass censorship of the world wide web whether this be on a government or a corporatelocalized scale. We truly believe the world wide web should be world wide and not censored in anyway. In later edits of this blog post they indicate that they do not log a users activity, just the log on and log off events, that they do this to identify abusive users, that they complied with UK law and finally, that there isnt a UK law prohibiting them to aid Egyptian to access social networks, such as Twitter, which was blocked by that countrys government. While I appreciate HMA addressing these issues openly rather than swiping them under the rug, the incident points to a serious flaw in the system. When you are selling a service that claims to protect a users privacy, hence identity, you cant turn around later and reveal just that to authorities without appearing at least a little insincere. Virtual Private Networks are used for many purposes, accessing blocked websites, accessing region restricted content, bypassing network filters, accessing Twitter, Facebook and Skype in countries that block such connections, or simpler applications like protecting your privacy when accessing a public Wifi spot and stopping your Internet Service Provider or ISP from snooping into your business. It doesnt take too much imagination to see that VPNs can also be used for outright illegal activities, copyright violations and hacking for example. All VPN providers know this and, while their terms and conditions always state that their services are not to be used for illegal activities, they derive a portion of their revenue from users who signed up for just that purpose, something all VPN providers are aware of. As a VPN service provider your main selling points are privacy, anonymity, presence as in how many countries you have IP addresses in and speed. At the same time you are also running a business if we neglect any hobbyists and non profits for a moment that was setup to make money, and as any legal entity you must comply with the laws and regulations of the country you are operating in. Many if not most or even all lease bandwidth and IP addresses from other providers, and abusive behaviors of their customers can easily jeopardize their business. Rav 4 Owners Manual 98. Usually the term abusive behavior when used by a VPN service refers to bandwidth hogs, subscribers with much higher than average bandwidth usage, potentially slowing down the service for others. With speed being one of the main selling points it is easy to see why. In response to the HMA Lulz. Sec case, many VPN providers now quite prominently claim on their sites, that they dont keep logs yet many terms and conditions also alert users that they will investigate suspicious behavior, apparently referring to, what they consider to be, illegal activity. My question then is this If a provider does not log your IP address and does not log your activity, how would they be able to investigate anything While the Lulz. Sec case may seem extreme and it is easy to think why worry, I am not engaged in illegal activities online The RIAA and MPAA for those who dont know, those are the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have come to an agreement with certain Internet Service Providers to cooperate to curb illegal file sharing under the clever and innocent sounding name Copyright Alert System or abbreviated CAS. They decide what they consider illegal and enlist your ISP to notify you, and if necessary, force you to watch educational videos or throttle your bandwidth. Maybe a no log VPN is a good idea after all Update Reuters reports that a Los Angeles judge sentenced 2. Cody Kretsinger to a one year prison term, one year home detention and 1. He also has to pay 6. Sony Pictures. Kretsinger had pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer i. April 2. 01. 2 and was facing up to 1. Update Hector Xavier Monsegur, also know as Sabu, the computer hacker turned FBI informant, was sentenced to 7 months in prison, basically the time he already served. A remorseful Monsegur pleaded guilty to computer hacking crimes in 2. FBI that led to the arrest of Jeremy Hammond, who was at the time the FBIs No. Hammond is currently serving a 1. Strafor the global intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, a crime Monsegur allegedly encouraged him to commit. You can find our comment policy here.