Teen charged with hacking into Air Force System
Saw this over at SNN
A 15-year-old has been arrested for allegedly breaking into US Air Force and US Department of Transportation (DOT) flight tracking computers in March 2000.
The techniques used by the hacker reveal standard system cracking methods in use today: sniff network traffic for plain-text logins and passwords, use that information for unauthorized access to the system, and then destroy log data once inside. A page out of Script-kiddie 101.
The US Air Force considers this a secure system, yet ironically, they did not install intrusion detection (IDS) capabilities until after they had manually detected the break-in.
If the US Air Force is vulnerable to a 15-year-old hacker(13 at the time of the incident), this begs the question: How vulnerable are they to sophisticated foreign military hackers?
Fortunately, the intruder didn't place any lives at risk during his escapades. It would be interesting to determine what exploit the teen used to access the system, and if it was a publicly known vulnerability at the time.
