Brief Updated History and Facts

1. Contest #1: Andrew Kerr offers to host a machine for a "hacking contest." After looking at it for five minutes I find a world writable smb share, but no holes in the Linux 5.2 out of the box system. Archangel refuses to look at the machine for several days, after being asked multiple times in the news group. I ask Andrew for an account during a break at work, within literally 3 minutes of logging in I have root using this script kiddy exploit. This is where the original Deli quote comes from, contrary to the opinions of unnamed, thick headed rednecks. Archangel screams bloody murder, shouting "It's not hacking if you were given an account!" Andrew offers to reinstall the box and give out accounts, but Archangel refuses.
2. Archangel finally finds my Electel page on Nacs, and proceeds to post numerous pages. He then begins to claims he hacked Nacs and altered pages, "taking trophies." No evidence of any such hacking was discovered.
3. Contest #2: Getting annoyed with Archangel's shouting, I contact a friend and set up his box to be "box #2." I contact a neutral third party who will have no clue how to use the shell I give him, and pretend to be the admin of some machine. The contest is setup, and Archangel proceeds to connect to every port by hand twenty or thirty times, especially in.timed. After is is obvious nothing is going to happen, I write up a shorty little ditty on how I supposidly got through. An obscure line in a log linked me to the server, and after bragging perhaps a little too much while enjoying myself at Dan's expense, I decided to leave the group.
4. One month after Archangel claims to have broken into the Nacs server, even though no evidence of any intrusion was detected, a script kiddy on a New York ISDN line uses the then brand new bind overflow to gain root on Nacs and rm -rf'ed it. Since the machine logged over the network to another box, and the user made no attempt to hide his IP, he was quickly busted. My admin followed standard procedure and contacted the FBI, who sent a field agent in to review the case. My admin was framiliar with Archangels story, and knew that Dan was clueless. He mentioned to the agent "This guy said he hacked my network a while ago." The agent then went through the procedures to contact 'Archangel', and then, wouldn't you know it, set up a meeting with one Daniel W. Garstecki of Santa Rosa CA. I have no idea what went on. But from what I've gathered, they decided to seize his only computer, a 486, for a period of several months. He must have gotten it back, because a while after his disappearance he reappeared. He spun all sorts of stories to make excuses for what happened.
5. [Probably a lot of stuff I'm missing]
6. Although I won't go into all of the personal details that I know from speaking to the parties involved, I can give a brief overview of what happened. Dan Garstecki, aka Archangel, lived at home while his wife worked. He refused to get a job. After he got the boot via divorce, he ran off with his daughter in a custody dispute. He hid out at his mothers house in Las Vegas, and then skipped town and ran off to Mexico. I don't know what happened, but he didn't care for his daughter very well. His face was plastered over numerous web pages such as PollyKlaas. Someone in Mexico saw his face, called authorities, and they grabbed him. He initially refused to tell them where his daughter was, but after some, ahem, persuasion, he broke down. Dan sat in a Mexican jail for a while, then was deported to the US to stand trial. He sat in a CA jail for about 5 months, and changed his not guilty plea to no contest. His jail time was applied to his sentance, and he got off with probation. He tried to regain visitation rights, but the judge informed him that he could not get even supervised visits until he found psychiatric help for delusions of grandeur or something like that, and find a job.
7. Dan now lives with his mother in Las Vegas, and I believe uses her AOL account to continue to troll usenet. He has been harrassing his exwife, claiming she abused their daughter, although nothing has been found. He now attacks everyone he meets, and has been sinking into the final depths of delusion. Taking him on seriously was important when this site was created due to the large number of people who either believed or were uncertian that Dan/Archangel was clued. Now that the truth is known, he shows that he no longer cares about maintaining an image and seeks only to spin obvious lies to continue the madness and keep people talking about him. He will continue to succeed with his tales of being a skilled long time hacker, because of the simple fact that alt.2600 readers cannot shut their mouthes. A proposal to ignore Dan was recently posted, like my old ignore campaign, but this was given even less thought than the firest attempt as posters wrote lengthy 'essays' on why they should continue responding to Dan. Thus he will always have something to talk about.
8. Archangel appeared on Art Bell, to talk about "What Hackers have planned for y2k." He babbled on for a while about random nonsense, such as backdoors being planted by y2k consultants, and something about Bin Laden conspiring with these consultants to bring down the United States. It sounded like a mess of random stories stolen from articles I've read on CNN in the past few months, with no real content. He is a very poor speaker, with plenty of "Umms" and "Ahhs." The host kept cutting Archangel off and asking for him to sumarize his point, but Dan continued to stutter on. Several callers ripped him to pieces. It was a total embarrassment. Of course he began to troll on usenet, and enormous threads began. Oh well. That's it for now.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

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   Balif