Virginia student pleads guilty to creating and selling keylogger on HackForums

A series of devastating operational mistakes brought down a student hacker who sold thousands of copies of his keylogger on HackForums.

A Virginia man pleaded guilty on Friday to charges of aiding and abetting computer intrusion, accused of writing a keylogger that sold to over 3,000 people and infected 16,000 victims.

Zachary Shames, 21, created the keylogger while in high school in Great Falls, Va., according to a Justice Department statement.

“He continued to modify and market the illegal product from his college dorm room,” the release notes.

Shames sold the keylogger on the infamous forum HackForums.Net, according to a researcher who spoke with Vice’s Motherboard. He used his real name in the process and accepted payment via PayPal, which can be traced rather easily.

HackForums, a seven-year-old information security web forum, is a center for both freewheeling education and cybercrime. For those who follow the forum, Shames’ age is no surprise. HackForums is home to teenage and young adults from around the world of wildly varying computer science skill levels. This is where Mirai was made public last year and where the malware’s many instances have surfaced over the last decade.

Shames’ LinkedIn page shows that he was an intern for Northrop Grumman, one of the biggest military contractors in the world.

He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and will be sentenced on June 16.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Technology

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure