From his home on the rural Far South Coast, computer hacker Abe Henry Crannaford reached out across the globe to extract restricted information from a large, private US corporation.
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The hacking culminated in January 2018 when Crannaford published employee details on his Twitter account and allegedly provided links to the corporation's firmware on GitHub.
In Bega Local Court on Wednesday, February 19, defence lawyer Ines Chiumento entered pleas of guilty to two counts of unauthorised access or modification of restricted data on the 24-year-old's behalf.
Police prosecutor Sergeant Liza Brown amended the charges' dates to having occurring between April 21, 2017 and August 15, 2017 for one and between August 28, 2017 and February 14, 2018 for the other.
She withdrew two further counts of the same charge.
Crannaford was living at Moruya Heads at the time of his offences although he now lists his address as Noorinbee in Victoria.
The court documents lay out the steps he took to access the corporation's restricted data.
For instance, he reportedly manipulated cookies and used a computer script to bypass the corporation's authentication process and access its internal "spftp" network to "scrape", or extract, data.
Also, he used a regular iTunes account to obtain an application for the corporation's "Switchboard", which hosts internal applications specifically for its employees, then used the information from that application to obtain more.
After the corporation, which is not named in court documents seen by Australian Community Media, sent Crannaford a notice he deleted the details from his Twitter account where he operated under the user name "q3hardcore".
But the Australian Federal Police were already aware of him.
In 2017, the AFP searched a premises in Adelaide and seized devices that linked discussions around the vulnerabilities of the corporation's internal network with Crannaford's user name.
The court documents state in November 2018 he was interviewed by the AFP in Cann River where he reportedly made a number of admissions over the matter.
In Bega court on Wednesday, Magistrate Doug Dick accepted the prosecution's amendments and adjourned the matter to April 8 at Eden Local Court.
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