Rocket-man hacker Rafa arrested

By
Follow google news

US police have captured a Venezuelan hacker after four years of tracking the suspect. Rafael Nunez-Aponte, known as “RaFa”, is suspected of attacks on the US Department of Defence (DoD) in 2001.

A member of the World Of Hell hacker group, which included members known as "Dawgyg" and "Cowhead2000", Nunez-Aponte stands accused of accessing a Defense website and defacing an airforce training web page. He changed it to read "WoH is back", deleted logging pages from Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) computers and sent transmissions to render the computers inoperable.


According to Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the US attorney, the arrest occurred on April 2 in Miami International Airport, and Nunez-Aponte will now be transferred to Denver where he will be charged with unlawfully gaining access to a government computer system and causing intentional damage.

The arrest forms part of a wider investigation into World Of Hell's activities and could result in Nunez-Aponte serving up to 11 years in prison. His family have since set up a campaign claiming he reformed and now puts his computing skills to more productive use.

The news comes only days after Estonian police collared a man in connection with stealing money from scores of European bank accounts.

www.defenselink.mil

Add iTnews as your trusted source

Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.
Copyright © SC Magazine, US edition
Tags:

Most Read Articles

Dead cars tell tales by storing data that's never wiped

Dead cars tell tales by storing data that's never wiped

Services Australia describes fraud, debt-related machine learning use cases

Services Australia describes fraud, debt-related machine learning use cases

FBI remotely patched privately-owned routers to evict Russian GRU spies

FBI remotely patched privately-owned routers to evict Russian GRU spies

AI-boosted hacks with Anthropic’s Mythos could have dire consequences for banks

AI-boosted hacks with Anthropic’s Mythos could have dire consequences for banks

Log In

  |  Forgot your password?