| Hacker (1) vs Paedophile (0) |
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| Written by Editor |
| Tuesday, 17 October 2006 02:33 |
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Former Hacker and Wired Editor Kevin Poulsen took it upon himself to do what MySpace said they couldn't do, track registered sex offenders on MySpace. The end game resulted in an arrest of a known sex offender that was back on the prowl for underage boys. Kevin wrote a bit of code in May to search the 1 million plus MySpace profiles for registered sex offenders. The script used publicly available information from the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry web site to trawl through the profiles of MySpace users looking for signs of known sex offenders.After excluding the fakes, Kevin was able to confirm some 744 sex offenders, of those he discovered some 497 are registered for crimes against children. In the process of the investigation Kevin discovered one offender 39 year old Andrew Lubrano, a man convicted multiple times for sexual offenses, now using MySpace to look for potential new targets. Kevin took his findings to the police who then investigated to the end that at the beginning of October police in New York arrested him. The full details of Kevin's run in with the paedophile can be found in his article on Wired here along with some scary stats from his mining of the MySpace profiles. It does beg the question however, this was with just the information available in the US regarding sex offenders registered there, what would the picture be if information from other countries was used too, how many more would be found. It also raises the question too regarding other Social Networking sites to MySpace, howmany of those are being used by sex offenders to look for their next victim. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites          |
| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 17 October 2006 02:33 ) |