Buster Hernandez (born August 17, 1990[1]) is a sexual extortionist, child pornography producer and cyberterrorist from Bakersfield, California. He used the internet extensively to target hundreds of underage girls under many pseudonyms, most notoriously Brian Kil and Purge of Maine.[2][3] In 2017, he was arrested after falling for a social engineering and hacking scheme by the FBI and Facebook, and in 2021, he was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison.

Criminal history

Starting from 2012,[4] Hernandez, an unemployed man in his 20s who lived in Bakersfield with his girlfriend and his grandmother,[1] committed a series of crimes on the internet from his home.[5] He extorted ("sextorted"[5]) high school-age girls for sexual photographs, who numbered at least 375 and ranged across at least ten American states.[1] To pressure his victims, he threatened to murder, rape and abduct them, and to commit mass killings at their schools. These threats caused multiple local schools and businesses to shut down temporarily. Furthermore, Hernandez would strategically post media online which he had already received to extract more sexual content from his targets.[5]

In 2015, the FBI noticed his case after a report from police in Plainfield, Indiana.[5] Facebook, a platform he used to communicate with his victims, had been investigating him for years in the hope of exposing his identity. He was hard to catch because he used Tails, an anonymity-focused operating system, so Facebook paid an external company to co-develop an exploit that could de-anonymize him. Exploiting a security hole in the Tails video player, Facebook transferred the custom-made hacking tool to an unnamed party, which in turn transferred it to the FBI. He downloaded and watched a video that appeared to be extracted from one of his victims, which was coded to reveal de-anonymizing information. According to Facebook developers, this was the only case in the history of Facebook where it pursued a criminal by sending a malicious file.[6] This method was described in the news and technology press as "virus-like"[4] and "hacking".[6]

Arrest and conviction

After this, Hernandez was identified and arrested in 2017. He was charged federally on 41 counts and in 2021 was sentenced to 75 years in prison.[1] As of 2021, he is imprisoned in the high-security United States Penitentiary, Tucson, Arizona.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Child Predator and Cyberterrorist, Buster Hernandez, aka 'BrianKil,' is Sentenced to 75 years in Federal Prison". United States Department of Justice, and United States Attorney's Office of the Southern District of Indiana. August 30, 2017. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  2. ↑ "Buster Hernandez User Names". United States Department of Justice, and United States Attorney's Office of the Southern District of Indiana. August 30, 2017. Retrieved August 25, 2023.
  3. ↑ "Buster Hernandez, aka 'Brian Kil,' and 'Purge of Maine' charged in nation-wide cyber sextortion and threat case". United States Department of Justice, and United States Attorney's Office of the Southern District of Indiana. August 30, 2017. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  4. 1 2 "FBI sting 'unmasks' US cyber-extortionist targeting girls". BBC. August 9, 2017. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Slisco, Aila (March 13, 2021). "Buster Hernandez Sentenced to 75 Years for Threatening to Kill 375 Children, Bomb High Schools". Newsweek. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  6. 1 2 Mihalcik, Carrie (June 10, 2020). "Facebook turned to hacking to help FBI catch a child predator". CNET. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  7. ↑ "Inmate Locator". Federal Bureau of Prisons. Retrieved November 17, 2021. Search for inmate 76731-097.
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