Intellectual Property Law

FBI agents and local police in Northern California are taking the lead in investigating Thursday's hijacking of Comcast.net, the FBI told THREAT LEVEL on Friday.

The Bureau's cybercrime specialists are joining with the San Jose Police Department in Silicon Valley to try and track down the culprits in the case, according to FBI agent Joseph Schadler.  "We are working closely with our local partners," Schadler said.

Defiant, in an undated photo from his MySpace profile.
Image: MySpace.com

It was not immediately clear why the case is being investigated by Silicon Valley law enforcment.  A police spokesman was not immediately prepared to comment.

Possible explanations include that Comcast has servers in San Jose that were impacted by the DNS redirect; that the IP address used to log into Network Solutions traced back to the San Francisco Bay area; or that authorities believe the hackers are located in the area.

In an interview with Threat Level on Thursday, the teenage hackers known as "Defiant" and "EBK" said they were expecting to be arrested at any time. But as of late Friday the FBI said no arrests have been made.

On Friday, the pair largely disappeared from the internet, and stopped taking phone calls, fellow hackers say -- though in the morning Defiant answered an IM via his cellphone to confirm to Threat Level that he had not been arrested.

The hackers could be charged with unauthorized access to a protected computer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and, conceivably, with use of stolen access codes to obtain something of value worth $1,000 or more -- in this case, the Comcast.net domain.  That would carry a maximum 10-year or 15-year prison term, though actual sentences in hacking cases tend to be much lower, particularly in cases without a financial motivation.

Defiant, during his  interview, did not reveal his whereabouts to THREAT LEVEL, but said he wished he "was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad."

The hacker's MySpace profile lists him in Cashville, Tennessee.

(Kevin Poulsen contributed to this report)

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