Twitter hacker’s home address published – on Twitter
One of Australia’s veteran online publishers has taken the unusual step of publishing the home address of the teenager understood to have been behind the “stalkdaily” worm which has been disrupting Twitter over the weekend.
Melbourne-based blogging veteran Duncan Riley, who publishes online title The Inquistr, sent out his tweet on Monday evening, Australian time. Riley has more than 5000 followers, many of them in the US, which is also the major source of The Inquisitr’s readership.
It followed the creation of a worm which exploited a bug within Twitter. Net News Daily published an interview with the teenager who claimed to have been behind it.
But Riley – who also writes the appopriately named Blogging Is Not A Spectator Sport – has gone one step further, having tracked down what he believes to be the hacker’s home address. He Tweeted: “Anyone live in Louisiana?” He then published the full address and zip code.
The move drew opposition from several followers, who warned of “mob rule”.
Sydney-based Jeff Waugh warned him: “dude, seriously *not* cool behaviour. completely irresponsible.”
And California-based @researchagain tweeted: “you may have got caught up, but I got hacked & I still don’t believe in mob justice”, asking: What if it was your kid’s name&address?”
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To be fair, you give me way to much credit. Do a Twitter search for the address: it was published maybe 100 times before I repeated it. The only difference was that I found an external resource to confirm the address (linked I’d note in subsequent tweets.) His address is freely available in legal documents online….why you may ask? because the same chap hacked Stickam (a popular video sharing site) in January. The same chap also publishes his home phone numbers (He has two) on his profile page (reverse phone number lookup is legal in the US) AND was actually sending those numbers out and daring people to ring him in the latest worm attack (and yes, it was confirmed by several that they were his numbers.)
I’m all for privacy etc, but a little context doesn’t go astray. This guy wants people to know where he is: if I made one mistake it was probably giving him the joy of having repeated his address.
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“Anyone live in Louisiana?” … seriously, Duncan.
Meanwhile: Dear Mumbrella, thank you for alerting me to the inaccurate location information in my profile. 😉
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Definitely *not* cool to advertise boys address. Must have been a weak moment, surely.
I was able to stay free of the hacking and it’s not the first time this has happened. Unless Twitter fix some security holes, it won’t be the last time it happens either.
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@Duncan, I had this page open for a while before I left my comment and your comment showed up when I submitted mine, oops! Sounds like Mikeyy wants attention and that’s exactly what he got. Still, I would have to think twice before tweeting a residential address, IP address for peeps to block spammers I’m happy to share though.
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i dont get what the big deal is – if the 17 year old didn’t want his address public he wouldn’t have had it on his domain registrations.
big deal.
privacy is dead people get over it.
Cheers,
Dean
(and yes those ARE my real phone numbers on my domain applications).
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Seriously ‘un-cool” it may have been. However, was it legal?
My real point here is we are going through the greatest revolution in communications ever seen in world history, in our history. And legal opinion is still set in concrete and by precedent by old men. The law desperately needs fourteen -year-old’s with legal degrees. Very difficult to come by, I would have thought.
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Hi Venise,
Actually I can probably point you to a website that will award 14-year-olds (or anyone else) a legal degree for a very reasonable price.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
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I’m not a fan of breaching anyone’s privacy, however, In this case it seems the little *ahem* has made no secret of who he is and where he is. Does anyone know how old this kid is?
JD
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17
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