News: Hacker caught thanks to Windows fingerprint ID

[Stalinium 59]

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https://www.techspot.com/news/113005-one-windows-most-hated-features-helped-catch-19.html
 

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One of Windows' most hated features just helped catch a 19-year-old hacker
Using a VPN couldn't save him

The thread that unraveled him was a Windows fingerprint called a GDID, or Global Device Identifier. Every Windows install gets one, and it quietly records device-specific telemetry. It's the same thing that can revoke your license when you swap a major part in your PC. Stokes tried to stay hidden by routing his machine through a VPN, which he then used to open an account on ngrok, a tunneling service that masks where traffic really comes from. None of that hid his GDID.

Microsoft handed that identifier to investigators after a court order, leaning on ngrok's timestamped logs to pin it down

 The underlined part means Microsoft knows EXACTLY how many of you use activators and other unlockers for extended security updates.

There's this reasonable comment by brucek I agree with. Or should I not?

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This is the kind of privacy violation I'm ok with: it took multiple court approved search warrants, and serious allocation of investigation effort, to go after a high impact criminal. This is the kind of reasonable trade off that should exist in our legal system: a measured way to pursue the few who deserve it, that does not turn into full collection & storage of all citizens always.

Anyway, what I really wanted to post about was congratulating the jewelry seller for not paying the ransom and for fighting back by involving the FBI. If more responsible organizations did this, there'd be a lot less revenue funding these ransomware groups, and a lot more opportunities to catch them.

[Tech Jedi Alex 1577]

On 7/14/2026 at 11:22 PM, Stalinium said:

This is the kind of privacy violation I'm ok with: it took multiple court approved search warrants, and serious allocation of investigation effort, to go after a high impact criminal. This is the kind of reasonable trade off that should exist in our legal system: a measured way to pursue the few who deserve it, that does not turn into full collection & storage of all citizens always.

Anyway, what I really wanted to post about was congratulating the jewelry seller for not paying the ransom and for fighting back by involving the FBI. If more responsible organizations did this, there'd be a lot less revenue funding these ransomware groups, and a lot more opportunities to catch them. 

Full agreement here, too.