Alleged ‘hacker’ now faces federal charges

A University of the Cumberlands student, who was already facing several local computer related criminal charges, is now in federal hot water over child pornography that authorities say they found on his computer.

On Monday, FBI Special Agent Donnie D. Kidd filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in London charging Sungkook Kim, 23, with possession of electronic storage media which contained matter involving child pornography.

An affidavit that Kidd filed in connection with the complaint reveals new details about the case some of which hadn’t been made public until now.

On Oct. 1, a female University of the Cumberlands student told Williamsburg police that she was the victim of attempted extortion via an e-mail sent from a Yahoo account, according to Kidd’s affidavit.
The person sending the email claimed to have copies of web cam video clips depicting the female student and her boyfriend having sex. The sender threatened to send the clips to the victim’s friends and professors if she didn’t send him another sexually explicit video of herself, according to the affidavit.

The student told Williamsburg Police Chief Wayne Bird that the video was made with her consent on her own computer when she was 17 years old and that her boyfriend was also 17 years old at the time. She told police she didn’t know the name David Jones, which was the display named associated with the Yahoo account that sent the e-mail, the affidavit stated.

Investigators later determined that the IP address of the Yahoo account was listed as Woodbine, but that it had been “spoofed,” which is a common term referring to the attempted concealment of a computer user’s location, the affidavit stated.

Investigators determined that the MAC address, which is a unique identifier for each device connected to the Internet, was registered to Kim, who was a student at the university, the affidavit stated.

After getting the initial complaint, Bird contacted the Cyber Crime unit of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, and investigator Tom Bell received permission from the victim to change her email password, assume her identity and seize the computer that created the video, the affidavit stated.
Until Oct. 24, the victim’s email account received several more emails from the Yahoo account threatening to send the videos and pictures out to the victim’s friends and teachers.

“Investigator Bell responded to some of the emails by posing as the student asking if there was anything else the person wanted, other than sexually explicit images,” the affidavit stated.
“The person repeatedly replied, in approximately 21 separate email messages, that the student must comply with his requests or he would send out the embarrassing images.”

On Nov. 13, Bird interviewed Kim, who is an exchange student from Korea, in the offices of one of the deans, and he admitted that he had sent the emails described above, the affidavit stated.
He told police that he was in a university science lab about one or two years ago when he saw a computer that a person had forgotten to log off of, according to the affidavit.

“He then admitted that he looked onto the computer and saw the video clip of sexually explicit conduct as an attachment to an email, and then saved the clip to his own thumb drive,” the affidavit stated.
Kim told police that he only sent the email to teach the victim a lesson and that he didn’t actually plan to send embarrassing material to anyone. He also admitted that he had placed key logging software on several University computers and that he had been capturing login and password data, the affidavit stated.

Police seized his laptop and several components, including a Western Digital 1 Terabyte external hard drive.

On Nov. 19, computer forensics examiner Bill Baker with the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, examined

Kim’s external hard drive and discovered a sexually explicit video with several minor females under the age of 12 engaged in explicit sex acts with adults, the affidavit stated.

The 28-minute video appeared to have females in it between three and seven years old, the affidavit stated.

Kim is scheduled for a preliminary hearing Dec. 1 in Whitley District Court on local charges of first and second-degree unlawful access to a computer, theft of identity, and possession of matter portraying sexual performance by a minor. He has pleaded not guilty to the local allegations.

Williamsburg Public Affairs Officer Shawn Jackson said the Cyber Crime unit of the Attorney General’s Office is still investigating to see if information allegedly obtained by Kim was used to steal money.

Click on the attachment link below to read the FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court detailing what authorities believe Sungkook Kim did.