27-year-old Programmer Arrested For Hacking Linux Kernel Website

A Florida-based man was booked by the police for a traffic offense in Miami. What’s so special about it? In 2011, the man named Donald Ryan Austin compromised the website kernel.org. It is a website run by the Linux Kernel Foundation for the development and distribution of the Linux Kernel. The police arrested Austin on August 28 when they came to know about his identity after stopping him.

“Austin was arrested pursuant to a four-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California on June 23, 2016, and unsealed Tuesday,” reads the US Attorney’s Office press release.

The 27-year old Austin has been indicted with gaining unauthorized access to four servers after obtaining login details of a person related to Linux Kernel Foundation. Austin utilized the opportunity to install rootkits and trojans on the servers. This allowed him to harvest the login credentials of other people associated with the organization. The sole intention of his solo hacking performance was to get access to early Linux builds.

The repair process continued for days and some Linux servers had to be shut down for a month.

Austin paid $50,000 to get the bail and he has been ordered to appear in front of the San Fransisco court on September 21. Possibly, he would have to serve a 40-year prison sentence and pay a fine of $2 million.

— Via The Register

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