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‘Bill Gates’ hacker escapes jail

Psychiatric and community service order for teen cracker Curador

A Welsh cracker whose "campaign" to expose the insecurity of ecommerce sites led to an FBI investigation has escaped jail.

19 year-old Raphael Gray was sentenced to a psychiatric and community service rehabilitation order of three years, in a hearing before Judge Gareth Davies at Swansea Crown Court today.

Gray (whose handle is "Curador", or custodian in Welsh) obtained the credit card details of thousands of people from sites with flakey security and published those details on two sites, paid for with stolen credit card details.

Neil Barrett, technical director of Information Risk Management, and expert witness for the prosecution in the case, described Gray's offences as "very serious" because many people could have had their credit card details exploited.

That said, Gray himself did not commit widespread fraud, said Barrett, who added that no "collateral damage" was inflicted by the cracker to the sites he targeted.

Credulous news outlets continue to report that Gray published the credit card details and phone number of Bill Gates on his sites ecrackers.com and freecreditcards.com, and sent a consignment of Viagra to the Microsoft boss. In fact the details published were an obvious fake, as you can see on an archive of his site (minus credit card details) here.

Nonetheless the self-styled "saint of ecommerce" caused huge inconvenience to the American, British and Canadian dotcoms he targeted. His activities brought him to the attention of the FBI and, amid fears details of 26,000 credit cards had been compromised, his house in the sleepy hamlet of Clynderwen in west Wales was raided in March last year.

Gray pleaded guilty to theft and hacking offences which fall under the Computer Misuse Act when the case came to trial four months ago. He admitted two charges of obtaining services by deception and offences under the Theft Act in setting up the two Internet sites on which credit card information was published.

He also pleaded guilty to six charges of intentionally accessing sites containing credit card details, but without using this information for financial gain.

Prior to pleading guilty, Gray had argued in his defence the he hadn't hacked into the Web sites. His defence was that because there was no way for him to establish that his access was authorised, it couldn't be unauthorised. Because of his guilty plea these arguments, which have a wider significance beyond Gray's case and could have opened up a line of defence for hackers, were not tested in court.

"It was a shame that the interesting arguments about authorised versus unauthorised access on Web sites were not fully exposed in the case," said Barrett. ®

Related Stories:
Cracker in 'credit card Viagra sting on Gates'
Welsh hacker pleads guilty to deception and theft
FBI tracks Bill Gates credit card hackers to Welsh village
Hacking credit cards is preposterously easy
Identity Thefts from the Rich and Famous

External links:
Curador's web site (minus real credit card details) - as mirrored by Attrition

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