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Spying Software on Daughter’s Computer leads to Hack into German Police

A senior official within the German department of police, recently, spied on the Web-surfing of his daughter that reportedly, led to a computer intrusion of "Patras" the monitoring system maintained with the German cops, published Naked Security dated January 9, 2012.

Ordinarily, cops in Germany utilize "Patras" for tracing suspects with the help of what's known as "silent" SMS as well as GPS tracking gadgets fixed to motor-vehicles.

Understandably, a Frankfurt am Main senior police officer loaded spyware onto the PC which his daughter used, for watching what she did online. At that time, the policeman apparently moved work associated electronic mails onto his private PC that's quite likely one form of severe breach of rules in connection with data handling.

Thus according to senior security advisor Chester Wisniewski at Sophos a security firm, the above act violates the policies as also it's nearly forever a bad thing to do. PCWorld reported this, January 10, 2012.

In the meantime, the e-mails the policeman moved carried information, which assisted online hackers to gain illegitimate entry into the Patras, which customs officials and police utilized for GPS-monitoring. Currently, authorities from Cologne are investigating the senior policeman.

Now, things were going this way, till a friend intervened who discovered the spying software on the daughter's computer. The friend subsequently, tracked the father's PC on which he discovered the security-based work messages. These messages were helpful for hackers as the latter got the details essential for intruding into Germany's federal cops.

But their offence was discovered. Consequently, a man, aged 23 and belonging to North Rhine Westphalia was detained on charges he hacked into the PCs of German customs department.

Notably, hacking attack against the Patras system isn't anything new. During July 2011, a hackers' cabal naming itself "n0-N4m3 Cr3w" meaning "No Name Crew" declared that they'd gain admission into one Patras server, forcing the officials in Germany to tentatively close the whole network as also begin an investigation.

Meanwhile, amongst all that got leaked out during the hack, usernames, passwords, documents, license plates, phone-numbers as well as geographic coordinates were included in connection with police probes.

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