[lug] Reporting an Intrusion

Evelyn Mitchell efm at tummy.com
Tue Sep 13 10:22:40 MDT 2005


* On 2005-09-13 10:00 Bill Thoen <bthoen at gisnet.com> wrote:
> Anyway, now I'm pissed off. I can report the intrusion with evidence from 
> my logs to the ISP, but I'd like to use a little more force. Since 
> breaking into a computer is a federal crime, is there a law enforcement 
> agency I should report this to, like maybe the FBI? Before I go off 
> half-cocked, what's the proper procedure in terms of reporting and 
> collecting evidence so that there's a chance of getting a conviction 
> should I be able to get any authority to do anything about this?

If you have the original hard drive preserved, then put it someplace safe,
on the chance that it may be of interest.

If you've restored your computer on the original hard drive, you've most
likely lost all evidence that would be useful in prosecution. Also,
the chance that a personal computer break-in would be prosecuted is
extremely small, unless it contained information which would be of more
than personal interest if it got out (credit card data, top secret data,
other classes of protected information). 

My experience has been that law enforcement is not interested in
agressively investigating this sort of thing because the impact is small
and personal, and the recovery from it relatively simple and inexpensive. 

Reporting it would be helpful. Computer break-ins are a route for identity
theft. Then you can demonstrate proof of loss to the credit bureaus,
and others. But it would be the identify theft that's likely to result in
prosecution, not the computer break-in.

To file a report with the police, all you'd need to do is phone them.

-- 
Regards,                    tummy.com, ltd 
Evelyn Mitchell             Linux Consulting since 1995
efm at tummy.com               Senior System and Network Administrators
                            http://www.tummy.com/



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