Tag Archive for: Teen

Chinese teen hacker did not cause Facebook outage

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Copyright AFP 2017-2021. All rights reserved.

Social media posts claim a global outage that took Facebook offline for more than six hours on October 4 was the work of a Chinese teen hacker. The claim is false. Facebook said the crisis was caused by an internal error, not malicious activity. A photo of a boy shared in the reports shows a 12-year-old who spoke at a Beijing internet security conference in 2014 after hacking his school’s computer system. 

“13 Year-Old Sun Jisu Hacked Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram!” reads a Facebook post shared on October 6 on a page with more than 65,000 followers.

“On 4 October 2021, Facebook and ALL of its messaging and social media platforms went down for about six hours, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram!”

The post claims that various media outlets, including Reuters news agency, reported that “the failure was due to a 13 year-old Chinese hacker called Sun Jisu.”

Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post taken on October 7, 2021

Facebook went offline for more than six hours on October 4 in a global outage that also hit its other platforms Instagram and WhatsApp.

Similar reports were shared on social media in various languages, including Malay, Arabic, Amharic, French, Spanish and Hausa. 

The claim, however, is false. 

Facebook’s explanation

A keyword search found no reports by Reuters news agency or any other credible media blaming the Facebook outage on a Chinese hacker.

In a statement on October 4, Facebook said that “there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end.”

In a separate statement on October 5, the social media giant said the outage was “caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making”.

Chinese hacker

A reverse image search found the photo of the boy appeared in this article by ECNS, the English-language portal of Chinese News Service, a Chinese state-run news agency, on September 28, 2014. 

Screenshot of the ECNS article

The photo’s caption reads: “Wang Zhengyang, the youngest hacker in China, attends and speaks at 2014 China Internet Security Conference in Bejing on Sep.24th, 2014.”

The report said: “Twelve-year-old boy Wang Zhengyang has…

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No youthful offender status for Alabama teen accused of wounding 9 at 2019 Mobile football game

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An eruption of gunfire at a high school football game in Mobile in August 2019 left players and onlookers running for cover and nine people wounded. The teen charged as the gunman has now been denied a bid for youthful offender status.

Circuit Judge James T. Patterson ruled this week that Deangelo Dejuan Parnell would not be considered a youthful offender. Parnell faces nine counts of attempted murder for the incident, which took place on Aug. 30, 2019, at Ladd-Peebles Stadium during a game between LeFlore and Williamson.

Video from the scene, as well as a series of photos shot by a photographer covering the event for AL.com, show people scrambling and ducking for cover after shots rang out. Six people were treated and released while three more suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

The teen accused of the shooting faces nine counts of attempted murder.

LeFlore and Williamson players take cover after gunfire rings out at the conclusion of the Williamson and LeFlore prep football game Friday, August 30, 2019, at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala.Mike Kittrell/AL.com

Parnell, then 17, turned himself in the next day. He entered a plea of not guilty to nine counts of attempted murder. The incident led to immediate moves to improve security at games by weapons screening and other measures, and prompted at least one lawsuit over security.

Within a few days James Barber, then the city’s executive director of public safety, said police analysis indicated that Parnell had been a bystander to a dispute between two other men. Barber said Parnell had pulled a gun once to end the confrontation, then began firing when it resumed a few minutes later.

The question of youthful offender status has involved a dispute over whether prosecutors should be able to submit school records and prison disciplinary records for consideration. Parnell’s attorney raised several objections, including the argument that the records in question hadn’t been authenticated and included handwritten notes “without any indication as [to] the author.”

Prosecutors argued that judges have “almost absolute discretion” over youthful offender status.

“The Youthful Offender report generated as a part of this investigation by the court in itself is filled with hearsay and is permitted as a…

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Florida teen sentenced in hack of celebrity Twitter accounts

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Posted: / Updated:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — A Florida teenager was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for his role in hacking the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls and scamming people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin.

Graham Ivan Clark, 18, pleaded guilty to multiple fraud charges as part of a deal with Hillsborough County prosecutors, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

Clark was the mastermind behind the scheme to take over prominent Twitter accounts and send tweets seeking Bitcoin payments, prosecutors said. During the high-profile security breach on July 15, tweets were sent from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also targeted.

Prosecutors said Clark was tried in state court instead of federal court because he was 17 at the time of the crimes, and state law allowed greater flexibility to try a minor as an adult in a financial fraud case.

Two other men also were charged in the case. Mason Sheppard, of the United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli, of Orlando, were charged separately in federal court.

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Teen hacker pleads guilty in cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Netflix, Amazon

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Teen hacker pleads guilty in cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Netflix, Amazon


A teenager pleaded guilty in a New Hampshire court in a cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Amazon, Netflix and several other companies, which resulted in a massive disruption to the internet in October 2016.The teen, who was not named because of their age, admitted conspiring to commit computer fraud and abuse by operating a botnet and by intentionally damaging a computer. The teen will be sentenced on Jan. 7.According to federal investigators, from approximately 2015 until November of 2016, the teen worked with others to create and operate online botnets to launch cyberattacks, specifically targeting online gamers or gaming platforms to take those computers offline altogether or otherwise significantly impair their functionality. These attacks are often referred to as “Distributed Denial of Service” or “DDoS” attacks, investigators said.The teen and others created a botnet that targeted “Internet-of-Things” devices, such as internet-connected video cameras and recorders, and turned them into bots to be used to launch DDoS attacks, investigators said. According to court documents, on Oct. 21, 2016, the teen and others used the botnet to launch several DDoS attacks aimed to take the Sony PlayStation Network’s gaming platform offline for a sustained period. The DDoS attacks impacted a domain name resolver, New Hampshire-based Dyn, Inc., which caused websites, including those pertaining to Sony, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Tumblr, Netflix and Southern New Hampshire University, to become either completely inaccessible, or accessible only intermittently for several hours that day, investigators said. Sony said its losses from the attack resulted in $2.7 million in net revenue.

MANCHESTER, N.H. —

A teenager pleaded guilty in a New Hampshire court in a cyberattack that targeted PlayStation, Amazon, Netflix and several other companies, which resulted in a massive disruption to the internet in October…

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