back to article FBI track alleged Anon from unsanitised busty babe pic

An alleged member of Anonymous has been tracked down after he posted a picture of his scantily clad girlfriend in an image bragging about his hacking exploits. Higinio O. Ochoa III from Texas has been charged hacking into the websites of at least four US law enforcement agencies before, in one case at least, posting personal …

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  1. Old Handle
    FAIL

    <-- See Icon

    Accidentally including your exact location in message taunting the police is failing about as hard as possible without actually qualifying for a Darwin Award.

    1. JimC

      Re: <-- See Icon

      It occurs to me that they might have a large database of less than anonymous people that they are monitoring through more sophisticated means they don't wish to make public, and they just wait until one of them makes a mistake like this to grab them with some evidence they are happy to make public in the law courts.

      1. Old Handle
        Holmes

        Re: <-- See Icon

        As conspiracy theories go, that's not too far fetched. On the other hand, having hung out with people who for one reason or another want to stay anonymous, I'm well aware of just how many ways there are to slip up, especially if you have a consistent pseudonym. And given we're dealing with the kind of person who can't spell "come at me" or "bitches" correctly I have no particular reason to think the feds needed extra help tracking him down.

    2. MrT
      Pirate

      Would have been perfect...

      ... if she actually lived in Darwin instead of Melbourne.

    3. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: <-- See Icon

      All of these clowns eventually fail due to their hubris.

      If they truly had any brains, they'd do what real spooks do - accomplish the mission and quietly move on.

    4. Annihilator
      Go

      Re: <-- See Icon

      There's nothing in the police's investigative arsenal that beats a criminal being stupid. Fortunately America are proud to claim some of the stupidest criminals in the world.

    5. BillG
      FAIL

      Re: <-- See Icon

      Someone else who should be filed under the category of "Arrest Me I'm Stupid"

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Re: <-- See Icon

        How stupid? Criminally stupid, obvioulsy.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Paris Hilton

      Re: <-- See Icon

      DO THEY REALLY EXPECT US TO BELIEVE THAT HACKERS HAVE REAL LIVE GIRLFRIENDS THATS WHERE THE FAIL IS GEEKS HAVE TO BUY THERE WOMEN FROM THINKGEEK.COM

      1. Annihilator
        Facepalm

        Re: <-- See Icon @Big dumb guy

        Good one. Now that you've mastered sarcasm, try mastering the caps lock key. Then read the story again and realise the guy lives in Texas and has a "girlfriend" in Sydney. Then look up the difference between "their" and "there". Then you're ready to move on to punctuation, such as the apostrophe, comma and question mark.

        Then, with luck and a lot of concentration, we can get you wearing big boy pants and stop you having those accidents.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Come me bro?

    Come AT me bro, surely

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Come me bro?

      I've never understood why script kiddies write the way they do, afaik leet speak hasn't been in general use for at least a decade. I can't even tell if they're failing at their own memes deliberately.

    2. Old Handle
      Headmaster

      Re: Come me bro?

      Probably, althoguh the missing preposition does allow for some interesting alternative interpretations.

  3. Darryl
    Big Brother

    ROFL

    To paraphrase:

    "PwNd by iPhone & EXiF data <3 u BiTch's"

    1. Mark 65

      Re: ROFL

      Can't quite beat the expertise of the "hacker" that takes the photos with a device known to add the GPS coordinates and even tells you on screen it's using the GPS. Then you edit it in your no doubt cracked version of photoshop, as I doubt you spunked a grand on software, before saving it without minimising or checking what metadata has been embedded and posting it as a two finger salute to law enforcement. Geez there's some fucking stupid people out there.

  4. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    No way!

    At first I thought he must be innocent seeing as he had a girlfriend! Then I realised he was in Texas and she was in Melbourne, Australia - cyber-girlfriend! The law of cyberdorks and natural unselection is still maintained. I'm guessing the "ample" bit means she was a fat cyber-girlfriend too?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not fat

      Nice arse, too, but a face that's too horsey for my tastes. I'm sure El Reg commentards won't have any problem finding Ocho-Putzo's other Twitpics of Kylie Gardner.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not fat

        Nothing a head transplant won't fix.

    2. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: No way!

      Not fat. If you bothered to go to the link to the real story from The Resister's paraphrased story, you'd see the picture. Here's the link (again):

      http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/hacking-cases-body-of-evidence-20120411-1wsbh.html

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Re: No way!

        Having seen a few hax0r groupies and Anonyputz types, I couldn't be bothered to follow the link. To put it simply, the fact that she was recogniseably human puts her above the average hax0r groupie!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pic or it didn't happen!

    </eom>

    1. Nun of Thee Above
      Happy

      Re: Pic or it didn't happen!

      Busted. Nicely busted, in fact. . .

      http://khiaao.blogspot.com/2012/04/busted-fbi-led-to-anonymous-hacker.html

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pic or it didn't happen!

        It doesn't appear she'll be going down.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pic or it didn't happen!

        Hmm, picture is hosted on the Hate Mail's web servers. I notice they've cropped a fair chunk off the right hand edge for some reason. And removed the EXIF data of course :-)

        1. Ted Treen
          Coat

          Guess he wanted...

          ...to make a clean breast of it...

          Coat 'n' cab, please.

  6. pixl97
    Linux

    A few simple lines to save yourself from prison

    ls | xargs jhead -purejpg

    or

    find ./folder_of_images -name '*.jpg' | xargs mogrify -strip

    I'm sure there are ways to do the same in windows, but I cannot be bothered to look. I 'clean' any images that I post to the web regardless if they're personal or not. It's a bunch of personal information that other people would rarely need, and if you're kicking the law enforcement lion in the balls, it will come back to bite you.

    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      Windows

      Re: A few simple lines to save yourself from prison

      Right-click -> Properties -> Details -> Remove Properties and Personal Information.

      Or the easier thing to do is to not try and hack the very people that would be kicking down your door. Of course the kiddies of 4chan have never been accused of having too much common sense.

    2. kain preacher

      Re: A few simple lines to save yourself from prison

      I turned off geo tagging on my Android. When I view pictures on my Android that are geo tagged it shows the city over laid on the picture. I'd be surprised if the Iphone did not display the geo tag in a simllar way.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "kicking the law enforcement lion in the balls"

      I believe the correct usage amongst young people these days is "to insert one's male genitalia into the native habitat of a swarm of large eusocial wasps of the genus Vespa".

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        What does a motor scooter have to do with this?

    4. Greg J Preece

      Re: A few simple lines to save yourself from prison

      My N900 auto-purges location information when it uploads photos to anywhere. No additional software required, it's built straight into the phone. Damn handy piece of kit.

  7. Martyn 1
    Trollface

    Hmmm

    Take pic.

    Insert fake xif data.

    your boss gets a bust from the FBI in the middle of the night.

    NICE

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Somebody made a boob boob

    Despite his boob boob this also does indicate that he is no real hacker or it's photoshopped.

    1. Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face

      Re: Somebody made a boob boob

      I bet he felt a right tit.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I'm disappointed...

        I misunderstood what the "unsanitised" bit referred to...

  9. frank ly
    WTF?

    Lost in all the obvious humour ...

    "A review of log files from the Texas DPS website revealed that it had been compromised on February 8 ... utilising a SQL injection vulnerability ..."

    The Texas Department of Public Safety can't even look after their own safety. How long have SQL injection vulnerabilities been widely known about, understood and fix measures been available?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More Anon members doing the Perp Walk

    Not exactly the sharpest knive in the drawer this dud.

  11. DasBub
    Headmaster

    Trey Burba strikes again.

    It's not quite a fake school shooting, but nice and lulzy all the same.

    http://cybercrimes.wordpress.com/tag/trey-burba/

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Embarrassing really...

    Smart enough to hack some bit of government, but egotistical and dumb enough to piss your scent on every lamp post from your neighbourhood to your cyber-squeeze's (tidy thrups there!). Not so anonymous after all.

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Embarrassing really...

      Yes, embarrassing, but not surprising. The bar is actually quite low.

      Whilst most government sites are probably no less secure than the average, there are a lot of them. (Governments are fairly large sprawling entities and every country has one.) It is inevitable that some will be wide open. If you go to a large multi-storey carpark on a Saturday morning and systematically try *every* car, I'm sure you will find that some of them are unlocked. (*) The only difference with web-sites is that the web-site search can be automated and probably isn't covered by the cyber equivalent of CCTV.

      (* At least, you would have done in years gone by. I think at least some modern cars have a preference for automatically locking themselves if the key(s) drift too far away. Human nature remains as fallible as ever, but the common failure mode has been identified and engineered away. If only there was such a thing for SQL injections.)

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Isn't this configurable ?

    I know you can usually turn the option off which stores location information in your pictures. However, I noticed that my Winphone has a second option: it can automatically remove said location info again as soon as you put a picture online (social media, skydrive, etc.).

    As such this leaves me wondering if the other platforms don't have an option such as this ?

    1. TimeMaster T
      Coat

      Re: Isn't this configurable ?

      Are you sure it works?

      Or does it re-encode the data and hide it in the picture itself while sending a message to the MIBs that you are trying to hide your location/personal info?

      Its a closed source app, you can't check the code to be sure.

      Mines the one with the foil lining and matching hat.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Tin Foil Hat

        Tinfoil hats are useless. Maybe they are even a conspiracy to make the paranoid more susceptible to mind control signals.

        If you want to prove this for yourself, wrap your phone in tin foil and then call it.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    Pictures!

    Or it didn't happen, as the saying goes.

    Sorry for 2 posts quickly after another; but if the fellow geeks want to actually see the picture themselves they should check out this article (link) on the Daily Mail website.

    C'mon El Reg, why didn't you post this important piece of evidence as well? ;-)

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Higinio O. Ochoa III"

    The 3rd?

    Why inflict the name Higinio on even 1 person?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Born to go to prison

    That's the only explanation.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If I may quote the film Hackers...

    "Yo, man, you an amateur, man"

    (ah that's just sent me off on a reverie, Angelina Jolie's lips - mmmm)

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    dat be "armature"

    Hackers, crackers and whackers all goin down.

  19. JOKM
    FAIL

    Security Fail

    SQL Injection its not exactly the hardest of attacks to prevent, even php provides methods to prevent it, I think the blame lies as much with the original developers as with the hacker.

    1. Tom 13

      Re: Security Fail

      No matter how technically simple the attack, anything that requires 100% perfection from humans to prevent is by definition difficult to prevent.

  20. Mr Young
    Happy

    Just where the hell did I go wrong?

    This guy can hack cumputers and his girlfriend lets him take photos of her? I should probably get out more often - hehe

  21. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    Great story!

    TBH, it's a great story - dumb hax0r gets caught due to his own taunting message of his cyber-gf's boobs. It sounds like something more out of a TV show, proof I suppose that life is often stranger/funnier than fiction. I bet the rest of the CabinCr3w skiddies are wetting themselves waiting for Higinio to roll over on them.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What goes around...

    ...generally comes around and payback can be Hell.

  23. DJ Smiley
    Holmes

    ....isn't it all a bit easy?

    Isn't this all a bit too easy?

    Knowing how /b/tards / anon LIKE to get people vanned (This is the art of getting random people / people who've annoyed them) arrested for various crimes, doesn't all of this seem a bit too easy?

    I dunno, maybe he IS that dumb, or maybe hes just another fall guy.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The image was taken with an iPhone...

    There's your problem right there.

    Real hackers don't use iPhones.

  25. This post has been deleted by its author

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Caught by more sophisticated means ;)

    Since FB is pro SOPA, I'd guess that they allowed the FBI to do a face match to track down the girlfriend's FB_account-IP-location and used the picture as the more mundane public excuse.

  27. IronBoltBruce

    World War Web Advisory #7: Anonymous Has Been Occupied

    "Anonymous" may once have been a homogenous band of high-minded hacktivist heroes working selflessly for the greater good. But sadly, that ship has sailed.

    WORLD WAR WEB ADVISORY #7: ANONYMOUS HAS BEEN OCCUPIED

    "Anonymous" has been occupied. And no longer just by web warriors laying waste to websites of the wicked, computer wizards worming their way into the iPhones of "Internet Security" frauds, or digital do-gooders doxing Congressional dolts and other corporate-controlled degenerates.

    Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is no longer a band. Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is now just a brand. Like Al Qaeda, Anonymous is the boogeyman. What "Al Qaida Terrorism" did for the corporate cartel controlling America's Military Industrial Complex, "Anonymous Hacktivism" will do for that same corporate cartel's Terrorism Industrial Complex, the vastness and taxpayer cost of which - if ever disclosed - would certainly defy comprehension:

    http://tinyurl.com/2e8cd5c

    http://tinyurl.com/6slmeg7

    And like "Al Qaida Terrorist", "Anonymous Hacktivist" is well on its way to becoming synonymous with "stateless enemy", a label we've seen loosely and liberally applied to any and all willing to fight back against the global corporate fascist perpetual war-for-profit machine when it illegally crosses sovereign borders to immorally massacre millions of their innocent wives and mothers, sisters and brothers, and others whose only crime was refusing to become another corporate fascist puppet by compromising their principles in exchange for power or personal gain. And once that label is applied, given AUMF 2001 and now NDAA 2012, the fascist puppet regime in Washington DC can use whatever measures it deems necessary to make the troublemaker disappear - including arresting and detaining indefinitely without charge or trial an unarmed American citizen on American soil:

    http://tinyurl.com/7gjczmu

    http://tinyurl.com/7ybcu7m

    Also sobering is the ease with which sovereign governments, corporate conglomerates and the global elite who control them can now conduct false flag cyber-ops to advance their agendas and blame them on the brave band of brothers and sisters behind all those virtual Fawkesian masks. Consider, for example: When the FBI penetrated Lulz Security, was their aim merely to probe the hackers, or to impact their agenda? Were all of the federal websites hit in recent weeks hacked by democracy-minded dissidents, or were some of them targeted by Shangdong saboteurs from one of China's six TRBs (technical reconnaissance bureaus)? And what was the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) recruiting hackers for, if not to hack?

    http://tinyurl.com/77x4qg6

    http://tinyurl.com/4xwe4zp

    http://tinyurl.com/2e4epbe

    http://tinyurl.com/7o6gaz3

    Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer for Finnish online security company F-Secure, answers with this:

    "Anonymous is like an amoeba, it's got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding - they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida. Its just a brand nowadays, nothing else. It's run the same, so that, like al-Qaida, anyone can credit an attack to Anonymous and no one's there to say otherwise."

    http://tinyurl.com/6p9owk6

  28. VulcanV5
    Happy

    Unsocial networking

    Three strikes and you're out: this bonzo has (1) Twitter counting against him and (2) Facebook making things even worse; all that's needed now is to see if he's in Google Plus. Morons don't rule the world. They only tell each other they do. (Please Like / please Twitter / please Share.)

  29. MrZoolook
    Coat

    <3 u pR1z0n BiTcH3'z

    I wonder if he is on the receiving end of *cough* 'SQL injection' during his stretch!

  30. NomNomNom

    This is why I only ever taunt the cops with ASCII art

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    edited in photoshop

    1. Download random picture of someone holding a sign

    2. *edit in photoshop*

    3. steal underpants

    4. profit as FBI bust some innocent shmuck

    Remind me never to hold a sign or piece of paper in any photo in case the keystone cops mistake it as evidence!

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They just want to have a party

    Evidently Anon members just want to have a butt party in prison. Why else would they offer up their identity so effortlessly?

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