Cyber-Crimes: A Practical Approach to the Application of Federal Computer Crime Laws

Catch Your Computer Criminal

Name

Institution

Name and Background

Antonio Dimitri is a US citizen born in Atlanta. He is the owner of an online venture that has been on the government radar for a few years. Antonio is not married but the rest of his family mother, a brother, and two sisters still reside in Atlanta. Antonio is a graduate of the New York University with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. He also dropped out of the University of Massa chutes while undertaking a Master in Artificial Intelligence.

Where the Criminal Lives

Currently, Antonio Dimitri resides in southern San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. He has a condominium and a private office in Silicon Valley.

Where the Criminal Works

Antonio works for Sure Step International as a Solutions Developer and Reverse Engineer. The company deals with Data Science systems that aim at providing visualization and business intelligence solutions. He has been employed at Sure Step International for six years and is paid poorly due to the unstable financial position of the company.

Fact Pattern

Antonio Dimitri and his friend were recently put on the investigations radar of the California Police Department due to the suspicious undertakings his company. He was then arrested with two other colleagues of his for the crimes and booked in court for a date of hearing and accused of a variety of cyber-crimes.

May 2010

During the year 2010, John started complaining about the poor wages that he was being paid by his company. At that time he accepted a friend to live with him in his condo and assist to lower bills by some percentage. His roommate was an expert in reverse engineering. During this time Antonio only had software development skills.

December 2010

Antonio and his roommate had lived for six months together and he was tutored on some reverse engineering skills. They were contacted by a client at an online site who knew about their skills to assist in reverse engineering a financial ERP system and give him the code to recompile and sell the system. The job was anonymous they did in the name of their online company and acquired a lot of capital to establish their company further. They conducted the crime using a powerful de-obfuscation tool that they developed themselves. Antonio and his friend attacked the system by use of its license file. The system provided a fake dialog message, that the system license file had an error and required to be reloaded or changed. However, they replaced the license file on the server using the credentials that they had acquired using a social engineering trick. The file uploaded as a file acted as a virus and it copied all the source code and the database schema. The online client then went and replicated the system, added some few features and sold the solution to other clients.