Teenage credit card hackers sentenced after vicious attack on UK business

Two British members of the notorious GhostMarket online cybercrime forum have been sentenced for hacks that stole details of thousands of credit cards and forced an online hosting company to go out of business.

Prosecutors claimed that 19-year-old Zachary Woodham, who used the online handle “Colonel Root”, chose the Punkyhosting webhosting firm to be his victim entirely at random, redirecting church webpages to pornographic content.

Ultimately the attacks, which took place between April and May 2009, put the Punkyhosting company out of business. Woodham then sent a taunting email to Punkyhosting gloating about his attack.

Following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Service’s Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), authorities raided Woodham’s Brighton home, seizing computer equipment. They also arrested Woodham’s 18-year-old accomplice Louis Tobenhouse.

Police found evidence that the pair had stolen thousands of credit card details, and had targeted online gambling…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.