Hacker who broke into Miley Cyrus account was a spammer

It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant some hackers and spammers are. Reading about the case of Josh Holly, the person who hacked into Miley Cyrus’ MySpace account, the hacker clearly shows his youth when he argues that he can’t ever be caught. Of course, when I was 19, I too thought I was invincible. We all did. My biggest crime though, was smuggling a briefcase full of beer into my friend’s dorm room. (Unlike Holly though, I was never caught!) He was just too sure of himself and spent a little too much time bragging about his exploits, and people who are a lot smarter than he finally caught up to him. As for me and my friends, we just drank the beer and moved on with our lives.

Holly, also known as “TrainReq”, had hacked into the talented Miss Cyrus’ MySpace and Gmail accounts and stole her personal photos, but according to a recent update on the account on Wired.com, his activities weren’t just limited to cheap thrills. He was, of course, a spammer and had raked in over a hundred thousand dollars, sending out spam from celebrities’ email accounts.

A Tennessee news channel obtained the affidavit that had been filed by an FBI agent last week, which provided some more details on the scams. Holly said that he often used hacked celebrity Internet accounts to send out spam because of the name recognition and the large number of people that follow them. And he has hacked more celebrities than Miley’s, too; and also conducted spamming using pilfered accounts from recording artists Chris Brown, Rihanna, Linkin Park, and Fall Out Boy.

The MySpace spamming worked by first gaining the password to the account through a social engineering technique; then he used the account to send a note to all of the celebrity’s MySpace friends advertising a ringtone for sale.

A look at Holly’s web site, http://www.trainreq.org, quotes him as saying he thinks of himself more as a “prankster” rather than a threat to society, and made the dubious claim that he caused no damage. Has the hacker given up on trying to be an Internet papparazzi and actually gone into something legitimate though? He refers to a new project called “Tube Tunnel”. There’s very little info about it, but it appears to be a music site that lets you download the soundtrack off of YouTube videos.