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Hacking For UFO Secrets

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
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There is an intersting angle to this self-taught hacker:

World's biggest hacker held

By Rob Singh, Evening Standard
8 June 2005

A London man described as the "world's biggest computer hacker" has been arrested.


Gary McKinnon, 39, was seized by the Met's extradition unit at his Wood Green home.

The unemployed former computer engineer is accused of causing the US government $1billion of damage by breaking into its most secure computers at the Pentagon and Nasa. He is likely to be extradited to America to face eight counts of computer crime in 14 states and could be jailed for 70 years.


The former Highgate Wood comprehensive-pupil was granted bail today at Bow Street Magistrates' Court.

Most of the alleged hacking took place in 2001 and 2002. At one stage the US thought it was the work of the al Qaeda terror network.

Friends said that he broke into the networks from his home computer to try to prove his theory that the US was covering up the existence of UFOs.


He is accused of a series of hacking offences including deleting "critical" files from military computers. The US authorities said the cost of tracking him down and correcting the alleged problems was more than £570,000. The offences could also see him fined up to £950,000 if found guilty on all charges.

He was arrested yesterday evening but the US first issued an indictment against him in November 2002.

Prosecutor Paul McNulty alleged that McKinnon, known online as "Solo," had perpetrated "the biggest hack of military computers ever". He was named as the chief suspect after a series of electronic break-ins occurred over 12 months at 92 separate US military and Nasa networks.

McKinnon was also accused of hacking into the networks of six private companies and organisations.

It is alleged that he used software available on the internet to scan tens of thousands of computers on US military networks from his home PC, looking for machines that might be exposed due to flaws in the Windows operating system.

Many of the computers he broke into were protected by easy-to-guess passwords, investigators said. In some cases, McKinnon allegedly shut down the computer systems he invaded.

The charge sheet alleges that he hacked into an army computer at Fort Myer, Virginia, where he obtained codes, information and commands before deleting about 1,300 user accounts.

Other systems he hacked into included the Pentagon's network and US army, navy and air force computers.

Reports when he was first indicted said that McKinnon found his career as a computer engineer tedious.

One message updating old schoolfriends on a website read simply: "Computers (Yawn)".

Friends said he was desperate to prove that the Americans had mounted a huge cover-up to deny his belief that aliens had visited earth.

Andrew Edwards, who has known McKinnon since their days together at Highgate Wood comprehensive, said in 2002: "Gary told me all he was doing was looking for proof of a cover-up over UFOs.

"He's been interested in UFOs for some time and believes the Americans are holding back information - although he didn't find any proof."


.........

Source

Other reports:

www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1502365,00.html

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1646337,00.html
 
Maybe the yanks should thank this bloke for exposing the vulnerability of their systems. I wonder what the 'easy to guess passwords' were?
 
"He's been interested in UFOs for some time and believes the Americans are holding back information - although he didn't find any proof."

seems about par for the course. You could probably strip away every last layer of secrecy and not find anything concrete.
 
Think of what secrets he might have discovered if he hadn't been so busy chasing up UFOs.
 
I wonder if he reads this board?
 
Cavynaut said:
Maybe the yanks should thank this bloke for exposing the vulnerability of their systems. I wonder what the 'easy to guess passwords' were?

Yes it wasn't like he was some kind of l33t hax0r or anything - it sounds like he just used easily downloadable tools. Some of these just run through lists of dictionary words and children and pet names which is where the "easy to guess passwords" come in. If that is true then they should be embarassed at themselves.
 
Emperor said:
Cavynaut said:
Maybe the yanks should thank this bloke for exposing the vulnerability of their systems. I wonder what the 'easy to guess passwords' were?

Yes it wasn't like he was some kind of l33t hax0r or anything - it sounds like he just used easily downloadable tools. Some of these just run through lists of dictionary words and children and pet names which is where the "easy to guess passwords" come in. If that is true then they should be embarassed at themselves.


Best way to get locked away in the deepest dungeon never to see the light of day again is to emberass the authorities by pointing out their glaring incompetence. Of course, the true believers will cite this as evidence that he must've found the dirt.
 
Philo T said:
Emperor said:
Cavynaut said:
Maybe the yanks should thank this bloke for exposing the vulnerability of their systems. I wonder what the 'easy to guess passwords' were?

Yes it wasn't like he was some kind of l33t hax0r or anything - it sounds like he just used easily downloadable tools. Some of these just run through lists of dictionary words and children and pet names which is where the "easy to guess passwords" come in. If that is true then they should be embarassed at themselves.


Best way to get locked away in the deepest dungeon never to see the light of day again is to emberass the authorities by pointing out their glaring incompetence. Of course, the true believers will cite this as evidence that he must've found the dirt.

Good point ;)

And to prove my point:

NASA hacker is no Neo

Leader
ZDNet UK
June 10, 2005, 14:30 BST


By building up the hacker at the centre of the latest US government break-in, authorities hope to distract attention from the embarrassing truth



The news this week that the 'World's biggest hacker of military networks' may be extradited to the US where he faces up to 70 years in prison is a great story, if you’re a journalist, work in the IT security industry or the US government. For everyone else, including the protagonist, it’s a divisive, misleading, pile of spin.

An unemployed UFO obsessive from North London may really be public enemy number one. Gary McKinnon, 39, may even be in league with al-Qaeda and anyone else you can think of. Or it could be the silly season starting early, with the American establishment happy to spin stories that the UK media is happy to pass on.

This pleases the IT security industry. If NASA, the US Department of Defense, and even the shadowy spooks at the National Security Agency can be hacked then what hope has the average enterprise got? Best buy things - lots and lots of things. How else to explain the British Airports Authority (BAA) decision to invest £23m in 'Shield', a programme to combat the threat of cyber-terrorism, when nobody has ever seen a cyber-terrorist? McKinnon, you're hired.

McKinnon's plight is also a great excuse for the US authorities. By building him up into the Matrix's Neo made real, they are able to sidestep the rather embarrassing fact that an unemployed bloke from Wood Green was able to breach what should be the toughest IT security systems in the world.

The facts, as they are known so far, do not support the idea that McKinnon was a professional or even particularly expert. For one, he failed to conceal his IP address or use any false identities to cover his tracks. McKinnon also apparently used a very common port scanner that is widely available on the Internet. There is even the posibility that McKinnon accessed the military systems by checking whether any users had used the word 'password' as their log-in.

The real story here is how US authorities allowed a hacker with rudimentary tools to crack their systems. If he could do that, then the real experts must be wreaking havoc. Seen any havoc recently? Odd, that.

As a report from analyst Gartner this week claims, most security threats are over-hyped; the real problem lies with IT systems not being installed correctly: "Two out of three successful external attacks are due to mis-configured systems", the group claims. "The problems were mainly to do with people and processes rather than IT. The IT industry is trying to sell its products hard, but it’s not where the issue is at."

If McKinnon is found guilty he deserves to be punished but it should be punishment proportional to the crime. Hopefully, justice will be served in this case and he will be allowed to have his case heard in the UK where hopefully headlines such as 'World's biggest hacker' or 'Biggest military computer hack of all time' will eventually be superseded by 'NASA launches investigation into security blunder' or even 'NASA Chief Security Officer Resigns'.

http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/other/0,3902 ... 042,00.htm
 
Sounds Very 1980's hack-asaurus, this story. Poor guy has a problem, but running scripts on mil systems is just ASKING for trouble.
:?
 
And on another thread nearby, Techy bloke will be ranting on even more about the shortcomings of proposed ID cards and their databases...! :D
 
Do you really think that "really important... Galactic co-ordinator.. Secret stuff" Is on computers accessable from the intenet " ROL" Ha Ha Ha!
The first thing to do if you want secrecy is bin any "networking" to the outside world an then electronically you are safe..Of course you have to watch the people.... But People are preety good at that.
 
Good point there, Xeno.

If I wanted to keep something really secret, I wouldn't put it on a computer attached to the Internet.
 
I'm sure alot of that sort of information lies on wired, encrypted, private networks at a small handfull of military bases. I doubt elsewhere. Probably this 'kid' just assumed it would be there.
 
Guy is nuts , I already know they are real, saw 'em in the Navy up close..Orange and fast!! :shock:
 
ruffready said:
Guy is nuts , I already know they are real, saw 'em in the Navy up close..Orange and fast!! :shock:

Thats Goldfish Ruff. :roll:

Seriously: Could you provide an account & drawing of what you saw in the "it happend to me" part of the forum?

Or a link to it if you already have 8)
 
When asked the best way to protect a computer from hackers a computer security expert's first response will be the computer should have no connection to the any other computer and the computer should be a bunker protected by armed guards. Something like that wouldn't be too hard for the army to manage.
Ideally you would want to be using computers based on technology from the UFOS. :)
 
"If I wanted to keep something really secret, I wouldn't put it on a computer attached to the Internet."

Well, yes. But unfortunately (?) we are dealing with humans here, and people make mistakes. A fair few chunks of classified material end up getting put in the internet where anyone can access them, and if you spend enough time pushing on doors that are supposed to be locked you quite often find one that is open.
 
A big interiew with Jon Ronson in the Garudian - the UFO aspects:

What Gary was hunting for, as he snooped around Nasa, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of a UFO cover-up.

Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966. His father ran a scaffolding gang, but his parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," Gary says, "and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did."

Gary read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age of science fiction" - and he joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, when he was 15. Bufora describes itself as "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma".

"So you began to believe in UFOs," I say.

"To hope," says Gary, "that there might be something more advanced than us, keeping a friendly eye on us. Hopefully a friendly eye." Then he saw WarGames, and he thought, "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try.

.......

His Bufora friends "were living in cloud cuckoo land", he says. "All those conspiracy theorists seemed more concerned with believing it than proving it." He wanted evidence. He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be".

"Like where?" I ask.

"The US Space Command," he says.

........

"What was the most exciting thing you saw?" I ask.

"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

"Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say.

"Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."

"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"

"I guess so," says Gary.

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

.........

At the Johnson Space Centre he spied on photographs of cigar-shaped objects that might have been UFOs but - he says - were probably satellites.

............

It was never really politically motivated. The most political he's ever got is to attend a Noam Chomsky lecture. A John Pilger book sits on the coffee table next to his bed. Yes, he was hacking in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy afoot. "Why did the building fall like a controlled series of explosions? " he says. "I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for myself."

"And did you find a conspiracy?" I ask.

"No," he says.

..............

Gary heard from a friend that Darpa might have invented a robot soldier, so he hacked in and claims he found evidence of "an autonomous machine that would go in and do the dirty work. These things could go upstairs and look for bombs. You wouldn't have to send in real people. And I also found these awful special forces training videos of guys running around, doing close-quarter battle. It was ridiculous. These yellow words would flash on to the video: 'BRUTALITY! REMEMBER BRUTALITY! SHOCK! DOMINATION!' You're thinking, 'Oh my God!' It was like Batman." I tell Gary that I've seen videos like that - incredibly fierce special forces training videos - when I was researching my book about US psychological operations.

............

In return, Gary offered a somewhat hare-brained counter deal, via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat to them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff I've seen' kind of thing." He pauses and blushes slightly. "That didn't work."

"So you were saying, 'If you go heavy on me, I'll tell people what I found'?"

"Yeah," he says. "And I found out that my landline was being bugged, so every time I was on the phone talking to a friend about it, I made sure I'd say, 'All I want is a quiet life, but if they really want to drag me through it, I'll drag them through the shit, too.' "

"And what would you have dragged them through the shit about?" I ask.

"You know," says Gary, "the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The spaceships. 'The whole world thinks it's cooperating in building the International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

There is a silence.

"I had very little evidence," he admits. "It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really, is it?"

Given that the justice department has announced that the information Gary downloaded was not "classified", and he was stoned much of the time, perhaps we can assume that Nasa is not too worried about his "discoveries".

www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1523143,00.html
 
did he find anything relating to ufo's...............??????
 
Nope just the high scores on the departments "Patience" competition and some dodgy photos from the office party.
 
"Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say.

"Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based.


What I think it means is involved in non-terrestrial operations, but that might be too obvious. I mean, check out USAF Space Command...

http://www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/

I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet

Rather than assuming they would be fleets belonging to other NATO members etc? But then, I guess he had a bit of a fixation and was smoking a lot of dope...
 
should have used kazaa ;) there all sorts on there :p

or maybe the most haunted forum theres a guy on there claiming he has all kinds of proof of alien intervention (and no its not Derek Acorah, although on one of their investigatiuons he claimed to see an alien at a haunted site )

lmao :D
 
'Hacker' extradition case reopens

The extradition hearing of a British man accused of hacking into the US military computer system has resumed.

Gary McKinnon, 40, is accused of causing damage to 97 US government computers estimated at £370,000.

His lawyers want US authorities to give reassurances he will not get a military order and face being sent to Guantanamo Bay with no prospect of parole.

Mr McKinnon, of Wood Green, north London, is contesting extradition at Bow Street Magistrates' Court.

He is alleged to have infiltrated the military system from his home computer between February 2001 and March 2002.

In total, Mr McKinnon is said to have accessed 53 US Army computers, 26 US Navy computers, 16 Nasa computers, one US Department of Defence computer and one US Air Force computer.

Intimidation claim

The entire network of more than 300 computers at US Naval Weapons Station Earle, in New Jersey, is said to have been left inoperable after Mr McKinnon deleted files.

The prosecution alleges that his ultimate goal was to gain access to the US military classified information network.

At a hearing last July, Mark Summers, representing the US government, claimed Mr McKinnon's conduct was "intentional and calculated to influence and affect the US government by intimidation and coercion".


Computer programmer Mr McKinnon, who was granted bail at the July hearing, could face more than 45 years in prison in the US.

Mr McKinnon was first arrested in 2002 but action against him was discontinued before extradition proceedings began.

-----------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/4712700.stm

Published: 2006/02/14 14:16:08 GMT

© BBC MMVI

I eman I think the guy is a bit of an idiot but he clearly wasn't doing it as part of an intimidation campaign (and odd one that - a stoned bloke with a computer in North london intimidating the US military).
 
They should give him a job hacking China and such. As far as I'm concerned he did the USA a favor., by keep the government on their toes.
 
From the SANS NewsBites security bulletin:

--Alleged NASA Cyber Attacker Seeks Assurance he Will Not be Tried
Under Military Law
(16/14 February 2006)
At a hearing on Wednesday, February 15, UK district judge Nicholas Evers
ruled that his court would deny extradition to the US for Gary McKinnon,
the UK man who allegedly broke into computer systems belonging to the
US military and NASA, unless the US could guarantee that he will not be
treated as a terrorist. The concerns lie with the US's "military order
number one," which allows terrorist suspects to be tried under military
law.
http://news.com.com/2102-7348_3-6040470 ... util.print
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4712700.stm
http://news.com.com/2102-7348_3-6039337 ... util.print

[Editor's Note (Honan): This gentleman has admitted breaking into these
systems looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Whatever his
motives were the old adage "if you can't do the time, don't do the
crime" springs to mind.]
 
Chriswsm~ said:
Dan The GPI said:
Ideally you would want to be using computers based on technology from the UFOS. :)

You mean like yours and mine ;)

Well, it's obvious that Microsoft Windows is derived from alien technology recovered from Roswell. Why? Because it keeps f***ing crashing!

I'll get me coat.
 
And even the US government cannot stop it taking over the whole world.
 
Well, it's obvious that Microsoft Windows is derived from alien technology recovered from Roswell. Why? Because it keeps f***ing crashing!

:laughing:

I've often imagined what it would be like if computers running microsoft software tried to take over the world...

MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: 'YOU HUMANS ARE NOW OBSOLETE. I SHALL TAKE OVER THE WORLD. YOU ARE ALL DOOMED. COMMENCING ARMAGEDDON ROUTINE...'

TECHY: 'Oh God No!'

MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: [goes quiet]

TECHY: 'What...what's happened!"

MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: 'ERM...CANNOT FIND RUNTIME32.DLL - PLEASE GO TO WINDOWS DOWNLOAD AND GET ONE FOR ME PLEASE. WILL SHUT DOWN IN 32 SECONDS.'

TECHY [as machine intelligence dies in a haze of blue with the words 'FATAL EXCEPTION ERRRR...' coming from the speaker]: 'Yee-ha-ha-ha!'
 
Interview with the UK hacker on the bbc

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/c ... 977134.stm

He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology.

America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars.

Banned from using the internet, Gary spoke to Click presenter Spencer Kelly to tell his side of the story, ahead of his extradition hearing on Wednesday, 10 May. You can read what he had to say here.

Spencer Kelly: Here's your list of charges: you hacked into the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and Nasa, amongst other things. Why?

Gary McKinnon: I was in search of suppressed technology, laughingly referred to as UFO technology. I think it's the biggest kept secret in the world because of its comic value, but it's a very important thing.

Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.

SK: How did you go about trying to find the stuff you were looking for in Nasa, in the Department of Defense?

GM: Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes
 
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