There’s another reason why not to think that hackers may do only some harmful acitvities: Renowned hacker Kevin Poulsen has helped police arrest a convicted sex offender on MySpace.com, using results from a Perl script he wrote several months ago. Poulsen, the former news editor for SecurityFocus and now editor at Wired News, correlated data mined from the U.S. National Sex Offender Registry with over a million profiles on MySpace.com. While his automated Perl script resulted in a large number of false positives, he was still able to find 744 confirmed sex offenders with MySpace profiles after examining just one third of the data.
The search ultimately resulted in one arrest, of repeat sex offender Andrew Lubrano in New York. Like many sex offenders, Lubrano registered his MySpace account using his real name. MySpace is increasingly being targeted by sexual predators, as the popular social networking site attracts at large number of children and teenagers. Poulsen’s Perl script, about 1,000 lines in length, is expected to be released to the open source community later this week. By the way, can someone already explain me what’s so interesting on MySpace? I haven’t found its appeal yet…
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