You might remember Muneeb and Sohaib Akhtar, the 34-year-old twin brothers we profiled earlier this week. Although they had the technology to commit petty crimes (like stealing airline miles) for years, the thing that really got them into serious trouble was the deletion of 96 US government databases within an hour of both being fired last year by the same federal IT contractor, Opexus. (Opexus had just learned that the brothers had previously been jailed for cyber fraud.)
The pair come across less as cybercriminal masterminds than as galumphing galoots — which is to say, a pair of idiots who thought asking an AI how to cover their tracks was going to keep them out of federal prison.
One of the little mysteries I encountered while writing the article was that the government had verbatim transcripts of everything the brothers said to each other during their hour-long arraignment. The two men lived together in Arlington, Virginia, so it made sense that they would be conversing in the same room rather than over text or instant messaging. But how did the government get access to the audio? Supersecret software bugging? Running crazy corporate spyware on their company laptop? FBI agent in the bushes with a microphone?
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