According to the official press release of the Justice Department of the South District of Indiana, Californias Baster Hernandez (Buster Hernandez) will spend the next three-quarter century behind bars. He was charged with 41 points, including: the creation of child pornography, violence and seduction of juvenile, receiving and distributing child pornography, threats to the use of explosive devices, extortion, threats to murder, abduction, sexual violence or harm (including third parties) , pressure on witnesses, as well as an obstacle to justice and the persecution of victims.
Law enforcement agencies have established at least 375 victims who are attempted or successful acts of extortion of sexual services online ("Sextoria", SexTortion. The Buster forced minor girls from the United States and other countries to send photos of either a video of erotic character to him. As a rule, Hernandez started a conversation with them online, then rubbed into confidence and began to demand the required content to him under the threat of violence. Usually he promised to harm some of the close victims, kill the interlocutor or arrange a terrorist act.
In his threats, Hernandez was very convincing, often worked with several accounts. In December 2015, due to him, two schools and several stores in California and Massachusetts were closed for several days. When in the town of Plainfield, local residents organized a meeting to discuss a possible reaction to such a threat to public security, the sauna sent one of the intransigent victims. The girl recorded the speeches of police and authoritative citizens. So the attacker was able to create the appearance of a personal presence at the meeting in his further statements and make terror more convincing.
If the victims suddenly became the Bastera, they refused to cooperate or ignored him, he tried to break their lives. Most often, he just laid out all the photos and video in Facebook communities, which are guaranteed native or classmates of victims. Less often, he was personalized: sending such files to certain persons. Fortunately, among the charges there is no appointment to suicide, so there were no catastrophic consequences.
Computer virus in the hands of justice
To track the criminal turned out to be very difficult - it acted with the help of several dozen accounts and was protected by advanced anonymizers. For a number of signs, law enforcement agencies suggested that the fracther of juvenile uses the Tails operating system. This Linux distribution is focused on maximum anonymity and privacy. To protect against any user identification, encrypted containers on a system disk for personal data are used, each time the system starts from a "clean" state, and all traffic is sent via Tor.Serious movements in the case occurred in 2017. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) received a special exploit (code that uses vulnerability in a specific software) for the regular video player Tails. One of the victims identified at that time played the role of a random duck and sent a maniac a modified video file in a certain way. Law enforcement officers separately note that it was not a pornographic content. When the criminal opened it, the exploit sent his real IP address to the FBI server.
Further was the case of technology. Police and FBIs found that the serial sexy maniac is located in Bakersfield, California. They were the unemployed Baster Hernandez (now he is 29 years old), living with his girlfriend in her house 85-year-old grandmother. The next three years went to investigate all his crimes, including those unknown to the law enforcement agencies. Now the court sentenced Bastera to the conclusion, and even if he lives to liberation, it will still be constantly under the police supervision.
Ethical Question
An interesting detail of all this story: where did the FBI in the hands of the Saving Exploit turned out to be in his hands? The agency does not reveal its sources, but, according to unconfirmed data, Facebook is involved in this. Hernondez basically used accounts in the world's most popular social network, so its administration was more than interested in helping to investigate (after all, this is a serious blow to reputation).
True, as we managed to find out in the last year, the high-tech-division of the Vice edition, the online magazine Motherboard, the method of helping the feds chose controversial. Journalists received information that Facebook paid the "six-digit amount" an unnamed firm specializing in cybersecurity so that its specialists hacked the criminal. They, according to the source of Motherboard - a former employee of the social network, - they created that exploit, and then passed the FBI.
It is difficult to argue that intentions of cybersecurity professionals, Facebook and detective officers were noble. The Baster committed terrible crimes, destroyed life and damaged the psyche of a huge number of people. The problem is that the Tails developers have no data on the vulnerability used. As well as the exploit itself they did not provide. So, there is a potentially likely to reuse. And it's not a fact that this will happen for the capture of a minor fist.
Tens of thousands of people around the world are used by the operating system Tails. Among them are journalists, political activists, government figures, victims of violence and witnesses of crimes, fearful surveillance. Anonymity in the network for them is one of the few ways to protect themselves from abuse of powers by force structures, corrupt politicians and criminals.
Source: Naked Science