A 15 year old hacker has been arrested by the Austrian Federal Police after he went on a three month hacking spree. Allegedly, he cracked the servers of 259 companies. Those companies were both in Austria as well as internationally located. Using hacker tools, he defaced web sites and boasted of his actions on both Twitter as well as posting links to data dumps of stolen confidential info and user data. As soon as he was arrested, he confessed to the hacking.


The Austrian Ministry of the Interior called him the country's youngest hacker and listed a wide variety of targets, which included sports equipment manufacturers to search engines, porn sites and public institutions. Operating under the pseudonym of ACK!3STX, he apparently joined a hacking forum and after finding out the site awarded points for successful hacks, he started raising through the ranks until he was among the top 50 hackers on the 2000 member site. Receiving multiple complaints from companies, the Austrian Federal police Cyber Crime Centre took over the investigation.

Using anonymising software to hide his tracks, he eventually slipped up, which allowed the Cyber Crimes unit to track his IP address and locate his physical location in the state of Lower Austria. The investigation is ongoing, with Europol being involved because of the international nature of the attacks. The exact amount of damage done is yet to be determined.