It’s science fair time in Canada, but one elven-year-old’s ambitious little project won’t be landing him any blue ribbons. No, his computer programming project has instead landed him in hot water with law enforcement officials. The minor — whose name can’t be released — decided to create and distribute malware that masquerades as a gold harvesting hack for the popular MMORPG Runescape.
Unsuspecting users fired up the app expecting to deposit piles of ill-gotten gold in their accounts, but that’s not what actually happened, of course. The username and password blanks never connected to the Runescape server. Instead, they forwarded the credentials to the malware’s pre-teen creator.
While his creation might have shown a bit of malicious moxie, this Canadian cyber criminal child didn’t devote enough time to covering his tracks. Authorities were able to track him down with fairly minimal effort thanks to the fact that he’d included an easily traceable email address in the application’s code. Investigators quickly pinpointed his home town and were even able to link the boy to an iPhone that had been recently purchased by his parents. He won’t be using it too much after the court hands down his probation.
It’s probably not fair to refer to this particular chap as a hacker, really, since it appears that the Runescape gold tool was little more than a hastily thrown-together .NET application that emailed data to an address that wasn’t even obfuscated. No, this is more clearly the work of an opportunist who either knew just enough to be dangerous or learned that something like this was possible on Google and figured he’d see how many greedy little Runescape fish took the bait.
