Sabu, the most notorious hacker alive today, has been captured by the FBI, and apparently turned against his hacker comrades. This is how the FBI caught him.
According to a FOX exclusive, the 28-year-old Hector Xavier Monsegur was living in the Jacob Riis housing complex in New York’s Lower East Side. The were able to find his address because he slipped up and logged into an IRC chatroom without masking his IP. It only happened once, but that was enough.
They began surveillance, and kept the “brilliant but lazy” Anonymous leader under watch for weeks. But then a rival hacker doxed Sabu, putting his name and identity up online, and the feds had to move before he started trashing all of his hard drives and data — thereby destroying any evidence the feds hoped to collect.
They moved. Monsegur’s Facebook account was subpoenaed, which revealed stolen credit card numbers he had been selling. But when they knocked on his door, he tried to deny he even had a computer, even though his modem was in plain sight.
But apparently, he cracked under a pretty rudimentary good cop/bad cop schtick from the agents. That seems odd, but apparently the driving force behind it was the mountain of evidence against him, and the threat of going away and having to leave his kids. Which goes to show that for all the camaraderie in the online community, it’s really hard to weigh that against flesh and blood family. [FOX]