21 year-old Queensland man Shane Duffy stands accused of hacking into a Riot Games server, accessing player data then selling that information for thousands of dollars.
Local police say that his arrest comes at the conclusion of a six-month investigation, which included assistance from the FBI. They allege Duffy used the data to sell player’s IP addresses, which could be used by opponents (or pranksters) to launch DDOS attacks against them.
Police also claim that 880 separate payments for the data were made to Duffy just last month.
Shane’s mother, however, disputes the Police’s side of the story. Saying that her son has Asperger’s syndrome — and that he stopped going to school in the 4th grade “because the education system did not want him” — she admits that while his advanced computer skills made him “capable” of the crime, the information he accessed had already been leaked online by others.
Kotaku contacted Riot Games for comment, and were told by a company spokesperson “We work with law enforcement professionals around the world to protect our players, people, and technology because we take security and data privacy very seriously. We don’t comment on active or pending legal matters.”
Mother of accused denies hack attack on Riot Games and theft of player information [The Australian]
Comments
2 responses to “Australian Accused Of Hacking League Of Legends, Selling Data For Big Bucks”
So why did it take three days for this to be cut and paste on Kotaku AU? It was on the US site on Thursday, strange considering you would think this would have more relevance to Australians…
Anyway, I think it is interesting that the article mentions‘challenging the mythology around hackers’ and in a comment in the article his mother said “her son had more computer hacking knowledge than Queensland’s best cyber detective” and the article on the Australian (and News.com.au) starts auto playing a trailer to to 1999 film ‘The Matrix’…
I’m currently studying a subject called Crime and Information Technology at University and after three weeks into the course I can already see that the resources and information the University (and Police) is using is well behind the times, some references are 10-15 years out of date. Our lecturer doesn’t actually seem to even understand current trends in online crime especially when in comes to fraud and data theft in videogames.
I feel bad for Shane, he is about to feel the pressure and weight of a legal system that doesn’t even understand the crime he is accused of committing or the methods that he would need to employ to commit the alleged offences.
hear hear!
I feel sorry for the kid in the context of a public education system that appears to have failed a highly functional because of his psychological condition.
But profiting from fraud is wrong and at 21 with what appears to be considerable intellect, he knew what he did was wrong and should suffer the consequences.