FBI helps to nail New Zealand hacker

I'm indebted to the New Zealand Herald for its weekend report about an NZ hacker who has been jailed on five counts of blackmail, document and serious computer fraud..

22-year-old Thomasz Grygoruk - there's a nice NZ name -Ed - reportedly used a combination of phishing, hacking and blackmailing techniques to make around £150,000 over a five year period.

Grygoruk met his match when he hacked into the email account of a US teacher in Pennsylvania and tried to blackmail him over details of his relationship with one of his students.

Unfortunately for Grygoruk, the student was over 18 and not in his classes. That made the relationship "not inappropriate" as far as the authorities were concerned.

The teacher went to the FBI, where an agent posed as the teacher's accountant and started tracing Grygoruk's IP address.The FBI discovered that the blackmail side of things was the tip of the iceberg, as the 22-year-old blackmailer was also a master phisher.