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Andrew “Escher” Aauernheimer
Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, and Andrew Auernheimer, 25, of Fayetteville, Ark., a 25-year-old Internet “troll” who previously called for massacres of media executives and others, are each charged with conspiracy and illegal possession of information.
Spitler was brought before a federal judge in Newark this afternoon, while government prosecutors in Fayetteville did the same with Auernheimer.
“Hacking is not a competitive sport, and security breaches are not a game,” said United States Attorney Paul J. Fishman. “Companies that are hacked can suffer significant losses, and their customers made vulnerable to other crimes, privacy violations, and unwanted contact.
“Computer intrusions and the spread of malicious code are a threat to national security, corporate security, and personal security. Those who use technological expertise for malicious purposes take note: Your activities in cyberspace can have serious consequences for you in the real world.”
Spitler told Channel 2 news reporter Christine Sloan “…a lot of the information in the complaint was misquoted and a lot of things were taken out of context.”
“This is blown way out of proportion,” he said, outside the Martin Luther King Jr. federal courthouse in Newark.
Auernheimer — known as “Weev” — claimed his group hacked into AT&T servers to show how vulnerable they were. He later accused Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Vartan, who is handling the case out of Newark, of conducting a “smear campaign” against him. This came after Auernheimer posted videos urging people to arm themselves with “lots of” guns and saying, “Jesus wasn’t a kike.”
“If charges are pressed,” Auernheimer insisted, “we will fight it and win.”
In an open letter to Vartan, Auernheimer called his prosecution “harassment” and a “smear campaign” that Vartan was conducting through “a desire for professional distinction.” He predicted that the federal prosecutor “may be required to resign” as a result of the investigation.
“[U]ltimately, you will be held accountable to the people for your actions,” Auernheimer wrote, adding that he believed the government was prepared to “engage in the manufacture of evidence” to prosecute him.
FBI investigators said all of the evidence was produced by both men.
Because he was “very public concerning his hacking and trolling activities, giving interviews to The New York Times, as well as other publications,” said FBI agent Christian Schorte, Auernheimer clearly “was not working for the public interest.”
An “Account Slurper” created by a group of hackers the two men dubbed “Goatse Security” attacked AT&T’s servers for several days in early June 2010, with the purpose of harvesting as many email addresses as possible from Apple iPad users who accessed the Internet through the 3G network, Schorte wrote in the application for a warrant to search Auernheimer’s Fayetteville home.
The slurper, he said, “was designed to mimic the behavior of an iPad 3G so that AT&T servers would falsely believe that the servers were communicating with an actual iPad 3G.”
During the “brute force” attack, the slurper cycled through different possible account numbers until it hit on genuine AT&T accounts, then stole the email addresses and other information, the agent added.
All told, the hackers reportedly swiped email addresses for members of several branches of the military, NASA, the FCC, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Health, as well as for executives from The New York Times Company, Dow Jones, Condé Nast, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, HBO, Hearst as well as others from Google, Amazon, AOL, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.
Diane Sawyer, Harvey Weinstein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel were also on the list.
The “trolls” even posted a video showing how they did it (SEE: Feds charge two in hacking of 120,000 iPad accounts)
Auernheimer and Spitler then gave the information to the gossip website gawker.com, the government alleges in a criminal complaint. Gawker then published an article “Breach Details: Who Did It and How,” in which it said the breach “exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet.”
AT&T immediately launched an internal investigation.
FBI agents said Auernheimer even emailed a members of News Corp’s Board of Directors, saying, “Your iPad’s unique network identifier was pulled straight out of AT&T’s database.”
Auernheimer also claimed he trolled Amazon.com and caused a “one billion dollar change in their market capitalization.”
According to the FBI, Auernheimer also told The New York Times he had collected hundreds of Social Security numbers — and, as proof, sent the number of the author of the story.
FBI agents were able to identify Auernheimer as the author of the emails thanks to his parents, who live in California.
Federal investigators said they also have instant messages between Spitler and Auernheimer that they say “not only demonstrate that Spitler and Auernheimer were responsible for the data breach, but also that they conducted the breach to simultaneously damage AT&T and promote themselves and Goatse Security.”
“On June 10, 2010, immediately after going public with the breach, Spitler and Auernheimer discussed destroying evidence of their crime,” court records show.
Auernheimer turned up on various law enforcement radar screens with a series of 1999 YouTube “sermons” in which he waves a gun while discussing, among other topics, “the biblical basis for keeping and bearing arms and the importance of drinking mescaline.
“Christ said it’s more important to have guns than to have clothes, or to be protected from the cold….,” Auernheimer says on one video, while locking and unlocking a handgun. “You need guns. You need lots of them.”
He urged viewers not to take arms against police. Rather, he said, “Be smart about your violence….You kill only the evil lizards that are responsible for subjugating your perfect society.”
“If you think scientology’s expensive, go try to convert to Judaism,” he says into the camera. “See how much they charge you for basic temple services…. Jesus wasn’t a Jew, and Jesus wanted you to f–k shit up.”
He later told Corrupt.com: “For Western values to survive, those who attack them must be exterminated. We should start with the [science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts], and move to the media moguls who are glorifying prostitution and drug use.”
Then, in an interview with The New York Times, Auernheimer reportedly said: “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?”
FOR MORE: “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money. I make people afraid for their lives,” said a notorious Internet “troll” charged by federal authorities in New Jersey with stealing email addresses for nearly 120,000 iPad users, including Senators, U.S. Representatives, officials with the Justice and Homeland Security departments, and executives from Dow Jones, Condé Nast, Time Warner, HBO, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, as well as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. CLICK HERE
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