opinion As the saga surrounding the alleged hacker known as ‘Evil’ has gathered steam over the past 24 hours, I have become increasingly embarassed for Australia.
Embarassed for the ineptness and over the top vaudeville style of our police when tracking even mid-level Internet rogues. Embarassed at the appalling lack of technical understanding which our politicians have displayed when it comes to discussing cyber-crime, and the speed at which corporate interests have jumped on the bandwagon. And, of course, embarassed about how my colleagues in the media have reported events.
But most of all, I have become increasingly embarassed at the incredible callousness with which our society has seized upon an unproven crime to further its own diverse naked self-interest, with scant regard for apparent defunct concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and that archaic concept which was once labelled ‘the presumption of innocence’.
So why do I feel this way? Let me count the reasons.
The first and most obvious reason that Australians should be embarassed by the saga surrounding the ‘Evil’ hacker is the way that the Australian Federal Police has handled and publicised the case.
When the AFP’s High Tech Crime Operations team announced it had arrested a Cowra-based man in connection with hacking offences this week, it did so with an incredible level of showmanship which dazzled the eye and attracted the media like flies to honey. The AFP’s nationwide parade of celebration and glory kicked off with exclusive pre-briefings on Tuesday night, conducted with major newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald. Candid footage of dozens of stern-looking armoured police raiding an unassuming house in the small rural town was supplied, and close-ups of the suspect’s computer, which appeared to be running nefarious-looking applications such as a Linux terminal prompt.
Then, at 6AM the next morning, the AFP issued a media release and scheduled a national press conference, both of which it used to continue to hyped up the arrest to a simply unbelievable level.
The hacker could have potentially “caused considerable damage to Australia’s national infrastructure”, the AFP said. “Hundreds” of servers, in Australia and overseas, might have been compromised, and the hacker demonstrated “an extreme and unusual level of malice”, and had basically “taken over” the system of wholesale telco Platform Networks.
With the ‘unemployed truckie’ label combined with his convenient online handle ‘Evil’, the AFP was able to successfully paint the alleged hacker as a gifted but tortured criminal mastermind, hatching plots from his rural lair under the cover of night, protected from the world by the thin veneer of a suburban existence, while skulking through Centrelink offices in the day in a futile effort to find work. A bit like ‘Clerks’ meets James Bond’s ‘Dr No’.
Hard-hitting segments on serious national affairs TV shows such as the 7:30 Report followed, and throughout it all the AFP’s statement linking Platform Networks to the National Broadband Network was given constant airtime.
The whole thing reminds me of one the last major raids the AFP’s high-tech crime unit undertook. In a lengthy broadcast on the ABC’s Four Corners show, the AFP collaborated with its colleagues in Victoria to raid the home of an individual who it claimed at the time was guilty of Internet fraud. The same camera footage of armoured police rushing a suburban building … the same shots of the suspect’s messy bedroom and suspicious computer; the same dramatic music playing in the background as reputable commentators emphasised the importance of the Internet to today’s economy.
However, as with the Melbourne raid (from which no arrests were even made, despite the event being broadcast on national television), the AFP made a number of missteps in its arrest in Cowra.
For starters, Platform Networks is a relative minnow in Australia’s telecommunications industry. I’ve been reporting on the space full-time for half a decade now, and I’d never heard of the company before it signed up to resell NBN services a few months ago. There has been no evidence presented yet that ‘Evil’ did more than enter Platform’s network and have a bit of a look around, and even Platform itself acknowledged this week that the hacker’s intrusion had had no “major” impact.
Then there is the fact of the AFP’s slow action in arresting ‘Evil’ to start with.
The AFP’s high-tech crime chief Neil Gaughan acknowledged yesterday that the AFP was primarily able to arrest ‘Evil’ because of an anonymous telephone tip-off. Some stellar policing work might have gone into the arrest after that point, but it appears as if it took a random caller to even put the investigators on the right scent. When the investigation did kick off in January this year, following a fairly harmless attack on the website of Sydney University, it took no less than six months to come to fruition. I consider this a remarkable amount of time for the AFP to be tracking a single fugitive, especially when those involved with the case have acknowledged the amount of boasting which the alleged hacker had engaged in online.
Furthermore, the slow speed of the AFP in making the arrest may have cost thousands of Australian businesses their data. It was six months after the AFP started investigating ‘Evil’, after all, that the hacker allegedly broke into web hosting firm DistributeIT, destroying the company’s ability to conduct its business and rendering the data of about 4,800 customers unrecoverable.
To compound matters, and despite the fact that it must have evidence that ‘Evil’ is behind the DistributeIT events, the AFP chose yesterday to only arrest the Cowra man on the basis of the Platform Networks attack, declining to even confirm a DistributeIT link in public and leaving that task to Australia’s Federal Attorney-General and Justice Minister, with the parliamentary privilege which the pair enjoys.
In short, the AFP created a massive national media storm over the arrest of a man on charges of … what? Having a ‘look around’ the network of a minor Australian telco which barely anyone had even heard of? Are you kidding me?
Of course, the situation would not have become a media storm if the AFP had not explicitly tied the arrest of the hacker to one of the biggest issues in Australian politics today. I speak, of course, of the National Broadband Network. And most of the media bought the line that the NBN was involved hook, line and sinker.
Despite the fact that NBN Co explicitly stated that it had nothing to do with the ‘Evil’ case, that its network had not been hacked, and that Platform’s network was not even connected to the NBN yet, journalists jumped on the NBN line like it was chocolate-coated caviar wrapped in hundred dollar bills.
Headlines like “NBN hacker arrested“, “Hacker denied bail over NBN plot“, “Doubt cast on NBN security“, “Cyber-attack alert for National Broadband Network“, “More arrests to come over NBN hacking” and others abounded, as virtually every major media outlet in Australia went to pains to inform their readers that the NBN had been hacked.
The only problem was, it hadn’t.
This didn’t stop both Opposition Leader Tony Abbott claiming that the greater “centralisation” of the NBN opened it up to “this kind of problem”, or Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull demanding to know how the NBN’s security had been breached.
Now it’s well-known that politicians will jump on any bandwagon … but it wasn’t just the Opposition hyping up the issue in public. AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram was one of those calling for more attention to be paid to the security of the NBN, while local hacking experts Ty Miller (from Pure Hacking) and Chris Gatford (HackLabs) were also making their feelings known on how easy in general it was for anyone to search for exploits in Google and then start breaking into corporate databases left right and centre.
These ‘experts’ might as well have been walking around Sydney’s CBD with chalkboards hung around their neck saying: “Scared of being hacked? Pay us to take the problem away”. The naked self-interest and advertisement apparent in their analysis of the ‘Evil’ case has been apparent for anyone to see.
Now throughout all of this process, what has been forgotten is one simple fact.
Right now, a 25-year-old man, a man who police have admitted was isolated and frustrated with his life and career, a man whose alleged hacking actions might be seen as a cry for attention, is sitting rotting in a cell in Orange and contemplating years in gaol if the Australian Federal Police can successfully prosecute the case that as ‘Evil’, he broke Australia’s cybercrime laws.
This man might well be guilty of the crimes that the AFP has accused him of. We will find out in due course.
However, in many respects, for the Australian Federal Police, for Australia’s politicians, its corporations and above all, its media, whether this man is found to be guilty or not appears to have already become increasingly irrelevant. Some would say that the Cowra man has already been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty. But even this doesn’t matter. What has mattered, for all of those above that I have mentioned, is that they are able to use him as ammunition to push their own self-interest.
The Australian Federal Police has consciously generated a media circus around the ‘Evil’ case, with the aim of dissuading future offenders from going down the hacker’s path. Politicians have used the case as a weapon to attack the NBN, despite the fact that there was no involvement. Executives from security firms have used the case to drum up business interest, and of course the media has used to the case to generate as many page impressions, sell as many newspapers and draw as many eyeballs to TV screens as possible.
For those who doubt my argument here; ask yourself one question. Would it not have been more appropriate for the AFP to have conducted a national media roadshow after the Cowra man had been found guilty, rather than before? Wouldn’t that have been the less risky and more sober approach?
Like most Australians, I am fully supportive of the efforts by the nation’s law enforcement authorities to uphold the law, and as a former systems administrator, I want our national technology platforms kept safe from harm … after all, we all rely on them on a daily basis.
But we must take care that we do not use criminal cases such as the AFP exposed this week as mere tidbits in furious feeding frenzies that ignore facts as well as the opportunity for cool-headed and sober justice. To do so will bring our society; our criminal justice system; nay, our democracy itself, into increasing disrepute.
Image credit: Tomas Lara, royalty free
Epic. Rant. Issued.
You’re right though…it was complete circus.
I have been sitting here stunned watching it all week.
Noticed… :o)
Agreed. Renai’s rant here, and Stil’s in Crikey today both point out the rampant bullshit from the AFP, the sucker media and the politicians. Sad thing is, nobody that counts will pay attention and no clarifications or apologies will be issued by those trading on the mistruths.
+1000
yakkitysax.mp3
Best article I have read on Delimiter so far. Thank you for saying what I have been thinking.
Cheers! No worries … this is something I feel very passionate about.
Submit this to The Drum Renai, seriously, it needs a national audience.
I don’t think they like cross-publishing things — tried that sort of thing before.
They’ve cross published from heaps of blogs – including some on Crikey. I’d say its worth a try!
Yup – I’d give it a bash too.
Yep I’d agree too!
A massive +1 to this idea. Its seriously one of your best articles ever Renai and it needs as much exposure as possible.
Great article, maybe consider submitting it to ABCs The Drum to reach a wider audience?
Any retractions so far? Interested to see who owns up to their own bullshit.
Nah nothing so far. I highly doubt there will be … there never has been in the past. However, there will be many words said if the AFP was wrong and this guy is even moderately innocent.
I am glad no-one is embarrassed about the poor state of spell-checkers in applications these days ;-)
Yeah I really do need to turn the spell-checker on one of these days ….
‘that Platform’s network was not even connected to the NBN yet’
Thats not quite accurate. The statement was that Platform doesn’t have any NBN customers yet, it doesn’t meant that Platform isn’t connect to NBN.
I’d imagine they’d be connected in some manner by now, since they’re in the process of onboarding. Things like integrating NBNCo’s service activation, service support, etc with Platform’s own. Putting in equipment in PoIs to hook up with NBNCo’s network.. that sort of thing.
I expect NBNCo to maintain a security standard that safely isolates Platform’s access from other NBNCo customers. But, since Platform would have higher privileges than the general public to access internal NBNCo systems, I anticipate a much greater risk when Platform is compromised.
I sat at a table with two chaps from NBN Co yesterday morning at an NBN Co seminar, one of whom has been dealing directly with Platform Networks, and he confirmed that they currently have nothing connected to NBN at all.
@Michael Wyres, gee we best believe that you sat at the table with two chaps from NBN… Your starting to sound like the guy who wrote this trash
@Peter T, next you will start quoting Judge Dread, get over yourself, the police did their job get over it. What do they have to be pulled up and held accoutable for? Upholding the law? You muppet.
@Renai, it sounds to me like you tried to get into the police force at some stage and failed, now you have got this big grudge on your shoulder.. Normally i wouldnt even read something as trashy as this but being the victim of a hack, im glad the police finally got someone and im glad it got under your skin so bad as to write this article which 98% of the public wouldnt even consider reading. Grow up and find some real news to write about, police in my opinion go above and beyond, especially when they are bagged out by people like yourself. Oh and if your walking down the street one night and a big scary shadow is following you, i bet you would have dialed for police assistance before you realised it was just the shadow from an old lady!
You’re welcome to your opinion of course.
Tell us, do you believe the NBN was “hacked” or did the media get it wrong?
‘if your walking down the street one night and a big scary shadow is following you, i bet you would have dialed for police assistance before you realised it was just the shadow from an old lady!’
Yes I’m sure the FEDERAL police would come a runnin’…
Your faith in the authorities with regard to the internet (we are talking about the internet you see) is touching in its childlike innocence, I’m sure many who have been incorrectly charged/investigated/paraded by incompetent, technically illiterate or just plain vindictive members of our agencies over the years will agree with you (baby swinging video reposters anyone?)
Couldn’t agree more, it’s embarrassing to see attempts (from the ABC of all people) to link this to the NBN.
Innocent until proven guilty, but Renai, you now have 4 stories on your front page related to this incident, all of them with paid advertising.
Just sayin’
True, but I tried to report soberly on it. In addition, we didn’t publish the suspect’s name.
So @jonaholmesMW won’t pick it up and run with it?
Congratulations on being one of the decreasing number of rational journalists.
heh cheers! :)
Great Article. I think the Police were way too over the top on this one, acting as Judge and Jury and nobody is there to call them to account. Your article echoes my own views very strongly. What ever happened to the presumption of innocence….. That 7:30 report was atrocious with the Police guy carrying on like something out of a George Orwell novel…
Peter
I feel the quality of 7:30 has declined significantly after Kerry Obrian’s departure. The abbort “I’m no Bill Gates” moment is a gloden piece but I don’t think I will see things like that anymore.
if he’d only called himself superdude there wouldn’t be such a frenzy, the AFP were always going to chest thump, after all it’s not everyday you get to claim you’ve defeated evil…
The reporting regarding the “hacking” has been deplorable, but should this surprise anyone? The biased anti-NBN media will jump on anything and use any excuse to point out why they think the NBN is a bad idea. They dont care if what they are saying is factual or correct so long as they “destroy” the NBN they’ve done their job. Further proof of what I’ve been saying all along is that they’ve run out of ammo, every other claim they make has been utterly debunked and destroyed so all they have left now is to make up stuff. We know the truth but that doesn’t matter, what matters is winning a few more votes for Abbott and his zoo crew chums. So we get a vision-less government run by a Luddite, we’ll only have to put up with him for three years… our communications infrastructure will have to last a lot longer though.
@Michael Wyres, gee we best believe that you sat at the table with two chaps from NBN… Your starting to sound like the guy who wrote this trash
@Peter T, next you will start quoting Judge Dread, get over yourself, the police did their job get over it. What do they have to be pulled up and held accoutable for? Upholding the law? You muppet.
@Renai, it sounds to me like you tried to get into the police force at some stage and failed, now you have got this big grudge on your shoulder.. Normally i wouldnt even read something as trashy as this but being the victim of a hack, im glad the police finally got someone and im glad it got under your skin so bad as to write this article which 98% of the public wouldnt even consider reading. Grow up and find some real news to write about, police in my opinion go above and beyond, especially when they are bagged out by people like yourself. Oh and if your walking down the street one night and a big scary shadow is following you, i bet you would have dialed for police assistance before you realised it was just the shadow from an old lady!
You do realise the article is having a go more so at the media and politicians than the police themselves
You sound like a rational fellow.
“get over yourself, the police did their job get over it”
Very slowly and he isnt even that much of a threat….. what happnes when someone realy has a go
Finally!!! I was beginning to think the world had gone completely off it’s rocker!! Thank you very much! Now, please teach the rest of the media that the population isn’t as stupid as it thinks. Even my girlfriend laughed & she knows nothing. She asked “but what did he actually do?” “why are they sending investigative footage to the media??” “Is they seriously for real???”
“Even my girlfriend laughed & she knows nothing.”
Ouch. You have much to learn, young grasshopper :)
?
I’m “embarassed” that your spell check doesn’t work :)
Ahhh, I see what they did here:
“But the company targeted by the attack said it could have been much worse if the national broadband network provider had failed to detect the man who had accessed the company’s computer systems for months.”
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/police-flag-more-hacking-arrests-20110727-1i0e8.html
This is providing plausible deniability by dropping the capital letters in “national broadband network” and suggesting they weren’t ever talking about THE National Broadband Network but rather just A “national broadband network provider” – which could be any company that provides broadband access, nationally.
Yes, SMH, don’t apologise or retract… OBFUSCATE!
That is a bit of a shocker, to be honest.
Turns out Tony Abbott is “no Sherlock Holmes” either.
finally…
been thinking this all week too…
cant wait to see evasion pieces worded like something that came from the IOCCC (international obfuscated c code contest).
“chocolate-coated caviar”
You’re not pregnant are you Renai? :-)
That’s the way things work – never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Mind you it’s not even a good story so that should probably be “Never let the facts get in the way of selling some advertising”.
Hi Renai and everyone watching this thread,
I think events this week have highlighted (at least in terms of the media) what I have long been saying – commercial media have an IRRECONCILABLE CONFLICT OF INTEREST that I don’t know how (or even if) they can solve.
The commercial imperative is to SELL ADVERTISING. (and to a lesser extent their newspaper/website etc.. itself) Very quickly it was discovered that the more sensational a story is (even if it is so unbelievable as to beggar belief) or the faster the story hits the streets (even if as a result it is UTTERLY inaccurate or plain WRONG) the more sales are generated and the better their financial position is.
The result has been a “race to the bottom” which frankly I think in the last decade has accelerated Shortly I think the winner will “smash on the bottom” at the point of the public (well the smarter ones anyway) belief that the news outlets are “a nice story to read” but serve absolutely NO function in as much as informing you of accurate facts !
Certainly the commercial media now rarely have my faith that anything report has even a natom of truth in it – in the case of certain (shall remain nameless) news organisations I would go so far as to say that the reporting is not only inaccurate but DELIBERATELY MISLEADING in promotion of the owner’s own political views and objectives – a GROSS abuse of position and power.
I’m also bitterly disappointed that the ABC and other “non-commercial” outlets seem to participate in this nonsense. I think there interests would be far better served with a reputation of being unbiased and accurate rather than “first” or “exclusive”.
As to how you “fix” this mess, I don’t know if you can, and frankly considering the number of people who don’t even see the problem, there seems to be little desire or will in the public arena to do anything at all.
All this sort of stuff is just providing ammunition so we can move onto the next stage:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20084939-281/house-panel-approves-broadened-isp-snooping-bill/?tag=mantle_skin;content
Completely agree that the reporting has been horrible, shows a lack of knowledge by the reporters on anything IT related, is sensationist etc. Also agree the guy is being used as a political pawn in the sense of publishing anything “anti-NBN” sells newspapers.
HOWEVER, what i’m most annoyed about relates the Distribute.IT hack. *IF* this is the same guy who completed that hack, he should have been arrested for this, as I would consider that this is one of Australia’s worst cybercrimes. The 4800 figure listed is just those whose websites were UNRECOVERABLE – not those affected. My own business was one of those affected but fortunately for only 3 days – we were one of the most lucky ones. Thousands of small businesses have lost what would be a massive amount in compbined money and reputation, both the businesspeople themselves affected and the resellers who have in some cases had their businesses virtually destroyed, including Distribute.IT themselves.
But, because of the incompetent policing and a focus on the wrong crimes by the media just because they could associate the “NBN” with it, means the arguement is all about whether the guy actually comprised the NBN or not, which is appears he probably did not. *IF* this is the same guy who did the Distribute.IT stuff, the court of public opinion (and maybe the real court) will be focussed on this NBN rubbish, NOT on what the guy has really done wrong.
I think the problem is basically that journalists are stupid, lazy and sensationlist, AND they hadn’t heard of “Distribute.IT” or “Platform Networks”, and neither of these are names that sell headlines. BUT, the term NBN does, so they have linked what will sell papers – helped by an incompetent AFP in focussing on the wrong crime.
So, what I’m saying – yes, the media got it wrong. BUT, if this is the same “Evil” who hacked Distribute.IT, it’s far far far away from some sort of innocent guy who just “had a look around” and should not be made out as some hero in the fight against ignorance of IT in the media!
Matt
“The Australian Federal Police has consciously generated a media circus around the ‘Evil’ case, with the aim of dissuading future offenders from going down the hacker’s path. ”
Sounds good to me……
Hi Matt,
I sympathise with the loss of your website. I do have some questions:
WHY didn’t you have backups ?
WHY didn’t Distribute.IT have backups ?
WHY didn’t both of you have a tested recovery / disaster management plan ?
With proper plans in place I have seen sites recover from total loss to fully operational (often to a new hosting provider) in UNDER 60 minutes – albeit with some loss of email that was “in transit” at the time, and a bit of disruption in the following 12 to 24 hours as the DNS system worldwide adjusts to your move.
My comments were in NO way meant to excuse the alleged behaviour of the person identified as “evil”. What he did was wrong, and it would appear he was responsible for more than one incident, if reporting is to believed.
What I was lamenting is the appallingly poor/inaccurate/downright misleading way in which the media reported this entire affair. Regardless of what the perpetrator that caused all these problems did, and how serious their crime, none of this gives the media license to inflate the situation with outlandish and non-factual claims.
Very late reply as I missed this, but to Calvin with your reply that accuses the victim not the perp I would still like to reply, as it displays a pompous arrogance that just annoys me….
“WHY didn’t you have backups ?
WHY didn’t Distribute.IT have backups ?
WHY didn’t both of you have a tested recovery / disaster management plan ?”
1) We DID have backups, and in the end because of this lost almost no data. But for a database driven website it’s not always that simple – backups are a snapshot in time, and it’s a bigger deal compared to just a static site. What you either didn’t realise or refused to acknowledge, is that it wasn’t just that data was lost – the accounts themselves were inaccessable. More on that in point 3.
2) Why didn’t DistributeIT have backups – they did, but they were connected backups. Almost any backup strategy requires connecting of something to the system somehow to perform the backup. This evil character was on the system long enough to observe backups being performed and learn their backup strategy, and used that against them to compromise their backups as well.
3) We DID have a recovery / disaster management plan. It’s just a matter of when you pull the trigger. As the servers were inaccessible, the basic gist of what then comes into play is put everything on a new server, then change DNS settings to make everything point to the new server. This is a good argument for keeping domain registration and hosting separate, those who had both with distribute IT were in worse trouble.
OVERALL – This blame the victim stuff is rubbish. If someone breaks into a physical business premises and destroys everything, people don’t blame the victim then, provided there were locks on the door. Sure some places have sophisticated security systems and others have just a basic lock, and of course one is better than the other. But in either case, it’s not the victims FAULT that it happened or that their business was disrupted, as you seem to imply.
“Regardless of what the perpetrator that caused all these problems did, and how serious their crime, none of this gives the media license to inflate the situation with outlandish and non-factual claims.”
With the exception of SBS, and occasionally the ABC, what MSM media outlet DOESN’T inflate situations…
Hi Stevo,
Yhankyou for the support – in my original post on this subject I specifically said:
“I’m also bitterly disappointed that the ABC and other “non-commercial” outlets seem to participate in this nonsense. I think their interests would be far better served with a reputation of being unbiased and accurate rather than “first” or “exclusive”.
Comments are closed.