The Man Behind the Hacking: Talking to Guccifer (NYTimes)

[CJCRANE]

By Andrew Higgins November 21, 2014


Marcel-Lehel Lazar, a.k.a Guccifer, tormented various celebrities with no special skills beyond what he had picked up on the web.Credit Cristian Movila for The New York Times

Excerpt:

Earlier this month, Andrew Higgins wrote a profile of Guccifer, the hacker famous for accessing the personal email accounts of many public figures and for revealing that former President George W. Bush had taken up painting. Mr. Higgins described what it was like to meet the hacker, Marcel-Lehel Lazar, in a Romanian prison.

For someone who had spent years covering his tracks to elude the F.B.I. and the Secret Service, Marcel-Lehel Lazar turned out to be remarkably easy to meet.

Mr. Lazar, who until his arrest early this year was known only as Guccifer (pronounced GUCCI-fer), set a single condition in agreeing to an interview at the high-security jail in Western Romania’s Transylvania region, where he is serving a seven-year sentence for hacking.

Before answering questions about how he managed to rampage undetected through the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin L. Powell and scores of celebrities and military and intelligence officials, Mr. Lazar insisted on reading aloud a lengthy handwritten manifesto. That, he said, “will explain everything.”

LINK to interview in New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/21/the-man-behind-the-hacking-talking-to-guccifer/

[bemildred]

1. Most email hackibng is password hacking (guessing) and it's easy, there are free programs.

Use a good password or don't say anything you don't want made public. (Or both.)