> In Wilson’s case, a piece of malware known as NetWire had added 32 files to a folder of the computer’s hard drive, including a letter in which Wilson appeared to be conspiring with a banned Maoist group to assassinate Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/20/indian-activ...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/modified-elephant-planted-eviden...
> In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/07/hacking-neighbor-from-hell/
In some countries you are strongly obligated to make contact with illegal images know to the authorities. Failing to do so is punishable.
Such an attack is as trivial, as annomously sending illegal material to the target, depending on the country. There are thousand of cases of minors sending nudes and causing legal investigations. You find articles of parents sending pictures to doctors and being banned from online services, which are known.
Other social attacks, such as giving out free USB sticks with incriminating material are thinkable. Allthoug I am not aware of this being proven to have happened, one can find cases where people used this as a defense.
People providing free uncensored internet by running a Tor node are known to have lots of legal troubles because of it, with different severity depending on the country. Even making it to no flight lists.
Illegal pictures might not be viewed by the public. A government could just claim they found them on your device and may have a way to exclude them to be viewn by anyone. So an individual may have to start a defense from the fact that illegal material has been found on a device, without a chance to ever see the image. Again depending on the country and legal system, there might not even be a need for those illegal pictures to actually exist. Here a document from a governmental entity suffices.
Simply seize some devices and place the incriminating evidence on them. Or just place a device with incriminating evidence among other seized evidence. Crime shows make you think every item is individually serialized and bagged or whatever but in reality they're just going to make a bag labelled "15 SD cards and 6 USB sticks". Stuff like hard drives is just going to be "hard drive #6" in the log. Just swap the stickers, easy as pie. You think evidence is stored securely? Secure is expensive, and it's all stuff of guilty people anyway (otherwise it wouldn't be seized).
https://techland.time.com/2011/07/14/man-hacks-into-neighbor...
This happened because a bunch of people had been defacing Australian government websites with messages from "Aush0k, the leader of lulzsec" in order to mess with him.
Those mean hackers even defaced MIT.edu with his name (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098218)
Flannery was later found guilty of some computer crimes, but not the ones for which he was initially jailed.
This wasn't "recorded" because the victim is a very private person; but I was part of a team that caught the prosecution in a little podunk town attempting to either interfere or plant evidence on a server DURING trial.
We absolutely caught them red-handed. Perhaps it could have been made into a bigger issue, but it's kind of like, it's a small town no one cares about -- the judge is obviously one of "them"," and the victim REALLY doesn't want to be caught up in big news stuff, so we're all opting to be quiet about it.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/120...
To this one that seemed to have been a scam
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/477482-paul-krugman-my-co...
Just to be clear. I don’t mean that Krugman was lying and he was actually downloading child porn and he was trying to cover his tracks. I mean that someone fooled him into thinking that he had been hacked. To make it more clear. There was no indication that Krugman ever had child porn on his computer that either he downloaded or that he was hacked.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/details-on-the-wild-allegati...
I say this as someone who's sister was killed by a policeman who ran a red light, but was revived by the paramedics. She had severe brain hemorrhages, lacerated organs, broke her spine in a dozen places, and her pelvis in another dozen, and lost the use of 1/3rd of her brain tissue from blunt trauma. And while she was in a coma, the policeman tried to illegally access her phone, obtain blood and urine samples without a warrant, and more, all in an attempt to frame her. And to top it all off, on the one year anniversary of her surviving, she was served papers in the driveway on our way to dinner for "emotional trauma" and his sprained wrist from the incident. The judge sided with the policeman, despite the tire marks, forensics, and eye witnesses that demonstrated he ran that red light. She was fined her net worth, which included her entire college savings.
She is alive and well, but will never be the same.
This isn't a statement on police or police reform as much as it is an example of systems put in place to protect us (courts, FBI, the internet and its attempt at security) but can with one false swipe destroy everything we've ever worked for or loved. It sounds dramatic, but there are a dozen stories on this thread that demonstrate that.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say, but it's insane how our social immune system isn't free from autoimmune diseases, where the mechanisms put in place to protect can instantly be flipped by a single bad actor.
The template is like this:
1) Someone plants evidence on your device 2) Investigators are tipped off or find it 3) You get fired, registered as a sex offender, thrown in prison, flee the country, and your reputation is in shambles. 4) the media, rumormill, or even public statements from government, your former employer, university, etc. are distributed like wildfire. 5) it's proven that it wasn't actually you, you were just framed 6) society bears no responsibility in repairing anything it damaged in the process. You're not guaranteed anything, and not only that, scary news travels faster and further than "redaction-based news". 7) you might as well have committed the crime because you faced all the consequences of doing it in the first place.
Did I get that right?
Anyway, people have been fired because a coworker received a forged harassing email, and IT found the message in the true victim's sent box.
Not really hacking, but, unlike every other mail client, GMail BCC (blind carbon copy) displays the BCC list to every recipient. This has caused significant trouble for people too.
Examples: Send carefully worded response to harassing coworker, and BCC HR. Coworker sees the BCC, gets further bent out of shape. Alternatively, sales person BCCs some corporate VP or legal or other person the customer is not supposed to know about.
As they say, if you are not paying, you are the product.
That's why you always boot into a forensic-type OS on CD before examining that USB stick that you found in a parking lot at work.
Also, I caught someone having had forbiddingly inserting a USB stick into a "white lab" PC. Which was a seldom used cybersecurity defensive practice to detect for (USB insertion) back in 2004.
It was a simple matter of a rsyslog plug-in using encrypted tunneling for its syslog messages to a remote log server. (He wryly did say, "I did not see that" and was eventually released on unrelated charges).
It's hard work to do all that because it's multiple layers ... of integrity, reporting integrity, that protects the innocent parties (as well as nabbing the guilt ones).
I do believe so. Twenty years ago as an curious teen it was easy for me to penetrate various systems and to dox people. Now the security is better but also the attack vectors and tools evolved.
If we aren't talking about oranizations with good security practices or paranoid individuals, it won't take a large organization to break in a target. A good prepared hacker could do it. Maybe not in a few hours or days, but in some time it is doable if that person is sufficiently knowledgeable and determined.
But we have to ask what for? Nobody is going to hack your personal system without having nothing to gain. And even if he has something to gain, the prior condition is for him to know this.
So that also means we don't have proof they are being framed because they haven't been vindicated yet.
Aside from criminal issues, most of this is happening in arbitration and civil courts.
I can give one or two suspect examples that mostly involve ignorance, resulting in the wrong defendant being there, the TV arbitrator finding the defendant absurd, and rewarding the plaintiff. Despite the defendant echoing well known issues in IT and cybersecurity circles.