The former leader of an anarchistic hacking group called the Electronik Tribulation Army was sentenced Thursday to 9 years and 2 months in prison for installing malware on computers at a Texas hospital.
Jesse William McGraw, aka “GhostExodus,” was also ordered to pay $31,881 in restitution and serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.
McGraw, 26, of Arlington, Texas, came to FBI’s attention in 2009 after he shot a YouTube video of himself staging an “infiltration” mission at an office building, in which he’s seen dramatically skulking through the halls and installing RxBot on a desktop computer. According to the government, the Electronik Tribulation Army was building a modest botnet to attack rival hacker gangs, including Anonymous — which at the time was known more for ambitious pranks than for the hacktivism that has since made it famous.
Computer security researcher Wesley McGrew. (Photo: Kristen Hines Baker, courtesy Mississippi State University)
In another video McGraw displayed his personal collection of infiltration gear, including lock picks, a cellphone jammer and fake FBI credentials. Both videos turned out to be shot at the Northern Central Medical Plaza in Dallas, where McGraw worked as a night security guard and had free run of the building.
McGraw pleaded guilty in May of last year to computer-tampering charges for putting malware on a dozen machines at the hospital, including a nurses’ station that had access to medical records. He also installed the remote-access program LogMeIn on the hospital’s Windows-controlled HVAC system.
“I think the sentence is appropriate,” says R. Wesley McGrew, of McGrew Security, the Mississippi computer-security researcher who first notified the FBI of GhostExodus’ antics after discovering screenshots of the HVAC access online.”He jeopardized public health and safety with his actions and I think its important to take a really strong stance against that.”
In the aftermath of McGraw’s arrest, other members of ETA mounted a campaign of harassment at McGrew, leading to FBI raids of three suspected members last year, but no apparent charges.
While his YouTube videos suggest McGraw was something less than a grave danger to cyberspace, FBI agents took him seriously when they learned he’d installed a backdoor in the HVAC unit. A failure of the unit — which controlled the heating, ventilation and air conditioning for the first and second floors of the North Central Surgery Center — could have affected hospital patients in the middle of a hot Texas summer, or caused drugs and other medical supplies to go bad, according to the bureau.
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