Phone companies' security shaken
As T-Mobile hacker is convicted, AT&T reveals break-in.
A 23-year-old Oregon resident has been sentenced to a year of 'home detention', after being convicted of hacking into
the servers of mobile phone company T-Mobile USA. The man accessed personal details of many T-Mobile
customers, including precious social security numbers, but claimed his actions were 'stupid' rather than malicious.
The crime, accessing a protected computer, carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines;
the T-Mobile hacker, on top of his year at home, was fined $10,000.
Meanwhile, US telecoms giant AT&T has revealed that an unknown hacker infiltrated its networks last weekend, and
got access to the personal details of up to 19,000 customers of an online store. The store was apparently shut 'within
hours' of the incident being discovered, and only customers buying broadband equipment were put in jeopardy. The attack
is one of many suffered by the company in recent years, exposing over 90 million records stored on their servers to
unidentified visitors.
Read more on the AT&T hack
here.
31 August 2006
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