On March 7th, a resident of Buffalo, New York was awoken at 6:30 am by a thunderous crash of his front door by ICE ( U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement ) agents. The Daily Tech fully explains his rude awakening. He pleaded he had no idea why they were calling him a pedophile but the agents were not convinced. Only until after federal agents had seized his family’s laptops, iPads, and iPhones did they realize they had the wrong guy. After using recovery devices to check his history, no evidence of child pornography was found. It was soon discovered that the man’s 25-year old neighbor, John Luchetti, had been cybersquatting, or in other words, hacking into on his home Wi-Fi connection. Luchetti was later arrested on March 17 and has pleaded not guilty. He was tracked from his user name, “Doldrum”, which was used to share child pornography through a peer-to-peer file sharing network. This user name helped investigators acquire his IP address which led them to his apartment complex which was very close to the initial suspect’s. Let this story be a lesson: Secure your wireless routers!
- Increasingly, cyber-criminals are turning to open networks to commit crimes, including distributing child porn. Government agents often miss clear clues that point that the true suspect might be someone other than the network owner. For example, in one of the N.Y. cases, the culprit had connected on a college network under the same alias — a lead which would have led officers to a different door, had they followed up on it. (Source: Chicago Title Co.)
