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TECHNOLOGY
Hacker breaks into U.S. wireless Secret Service files A hacker broke into a wireless carrier's network over at least seven months and read e-mails and personal computer files of hundreds of customers, including the Secret Service agent investigating the hacker, the U.S. government said Wednesday. The hacker obtained an internal Secret Service memorandum and part of a mutual-assistance legal treaty from Russia. The documents contained ``highly sensitive information pertaining to ongoing...criminal cases,'' court records said. The break-in targeted the network for Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile USA, which has 16.3 million customers in the United States. It was discovered during a broad Secret Service investigation, Operation Firewall, which targeted underground hacker organizations known as Shadowcrew, Carderplanet and Darkprofits. The hacker was able to view the names and Social Security numbers of 400 customers, all of whom were notified in writing about the break-in, T-Mobile said. It said customer credit card numbers and other financial information never were revealed. "Safeguarding T-Mobile customer information is a top priority for the company," said a spokesman, Peter Dobrow. He said T-Mobile discovered the break-in late in 2003 and "immediately took steps that prevented any further access to this system." Court records said the hacker had access to T-Mobile customer information from at least March through October last year. The Secret Service said its agent, Peter Cavicchia, should not have been using his personal handheld computer for government work. Cavicchia, a respected investigator who has specialized in tracking hackers, was a T-Mobile customer who coincidentally was investigating the T-Mobile break-in, said court documents and a Secret Service spokesman, Jonathan Cherry. Cavicchia, who won the Secret Service's medal of valour for his actions in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, resigned to work in the private sector. He said he was not asked to leave and was cleared during an internal investigation into whether he had improperly revealed sensitive information or violated agency rules. Nicolas Lee Jacobsen, 21, of Santa Ana, Calif., a computer engineer, has been charged with the break-in in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Investigators said they traced the hacker's online activities to a hotel near Buffalo, N.Y., where Jacobsen was staying. Court records said an online offer in March 2004, traced to Jacobsen, claimed hackers could look up the name, Social Security number, birth date and passwords for voice mails and e-mails for T-Mobile customers. Jacobsen, who was arrested in October in California, has been released on a $25,000 bail posted by his uncle, who was ordered to keep his own personal computer locked up so Jacobsen couldn't use it. |
The case against Jacobsen was first reported by the website Security Focus, which is owned by Symantec Corp. Cherry, the Secret Service spokesman, said the agency's own e-mail servers were not affected by the T-Mobile break-in. "The account was a personal account of a Secret Service agent that was for a time compromised," Cherry said. Cavicchia's T-Mobile handheld computer contained "very limited investigative material" that was obtained by the hacker, Cherry said, adding no government investigations were compromised. Cherry said Secret Service policies prohibit agents from keeping work-related files on personal computers. Cavicchia said Secret Service supervisors frequently e-mailed documents and other files to his wireless computer to review while he was travelling. Apple's recycling policies problems Apple Computer has become the darling of the technology sector for its wildly popular digital music player. But scorching iPod sales have also made it the target of an aggressive environmental coalition, which is trashing Apple as rotten to the core. Environmentalists with the Computer TakeBack Campaign are planning a year long campaign to protest Apple's lackluster recycling efforts. The group says it's planing protests at Apple's California, headquarters throughout 2005. It also plans a letter-writing and e-mail campaign, and other attacks against the maker of Macintosh computers. Environmentalists say they're targeting Apple because the company makes it difficult to replace batteries in its digital music players. It also charges some consumers to recycle their unused or broken computers and laptops. Last year, the advocacy group badgered Dell until it significantly bolstered its recycling initiatives. Plagued by pirates, gaming industry unveils its own legal P2P software Last fall, Vancouver art director Tavis Dunn recently used a new program called Steam to download PC gaming's most anticipated title of the 2004, Half-Life 2 to his computer's hard drive. It was a week before the game's official release date, which, ironically, had been delayed for a year because the first version of its code had been pirated and posted to the Internet. So is Dunn, who works for Greedy Productions, producers of such popular gamer-oriented TV shows as Electric Playground, just another over-eager downloader of pirated games? Well, no. Steam, unlike Kazaa, Limewire, eDonkey 2000, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer programs, is a creation of the game's own developer, Seattle-based Valve Corp.And Steam, which allows for complete game downloads and seamless invisible updates, could just be the first sign that an industry that loses some $3 billion U.S. each year to piracy is considering operating its own legal download sites, just like the music industry. Greedy Productions' executive producer Victor Lucas, who noted that two hugely popular games, Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, were pirated to the Net, sees the arrival of Steam as the beginning of a change brought about by peer-to-peer networks." People in any kind of content development are looking at the success of iTunes and Apple's dominance of the music-playing sector and questioning what the implications are for future media delivery," said Lucas. He said that just as movie makers are looking at an iTunes-style delivery system, he "wouldn't doubt that somewhere down the road an iteration of a game service will be out there."
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