Whoaa!! Jamaican Computer Hacker in police custody

Whoaa!! Sometimes you don’t know whether to be smiling or sad when you read something like this. You see there is always a slight cool factor in being called a hacker and even siding with a hacker and when it’s a Jamaican hacker, you’re torn. Why? Well because hackers generally are perceived as these super bright, lone wolves of the night, threatening to take down establishments that they deem as greedy and unworthy-but as we all know, which ever way you cut it, it’s downright illegal and it’s not funny but very sad when it’s your company’s systems, your identity or money that’s been stolen.
Such is the case here.

According to the JamaicaObserver, “PHILPOTT Martin, the 26-year-old computer specialist and computer programmer who was arrested on the weekend following a two-year cyber-crime investigation.” He was arrested at held at his home on the weekend by detectives from the Organised Crime Investigation Division (OCID). Martin is facing three counts of simple larceny and one count of conspiracy to defraud.

It seems he was under investigation for the past two years, as there were numerous ” complaints from businesses and individuals, whose computer networks were compromised through network intrusion, data interception, data and identity theft.”

The Jamaican police also said that “The allegations also involve the transfer of funds electronically from the accounts of both local and overseas institutions totaling million of dollars to the Cayman Islands and USA; among the institutions that were compromised is one of our own major telecommunication providers.

The Hacker’s Tools Seized.
The Jamaican police said J$600,000, believed to be the proceeds of recent crimes, was seized during the operation on Saturday.Police said they also seized a number of items: Among them were:

. two all-in-one printers;
. two external hard drives;
. six GPRS modems;
. one physical server, comprising of at least six to seven virtual servers;
. one desktop computer;
. five laptop computers;
. seven mobile phones and a quantity of SIM cards.
– Financial records, documents and other items of furniture were seized.

Also at the time At the time of the raid, five computers were being used on a network, attempting to hack into one of our major telecommunications’ networks using PGP encryption software, which is used to hide data.