Law and Order

Four high school students in Sydney, Australia have been charged over a Russian-based global Internet scam that stole people's online banking passwords and siphoned their cash into accounts in eastern Europe, police said.

New South Wales state police on Thursday said the four students, ages 15-17, cannot be named for legal reasons.

The four students were promised of a cut of the profits for letting their bank accounts be used for laundering the money, stolen from Internet bankers via a computer virus that secretly recorded passwords, police said.

Two US couples have been arrested on suspicion of masterminding a price switching scam involving counterfeit bar codes estimated to have cost Wal-Mart stores across 19 US states a total of $1.5m over the last decade.

A brave BitTorrent server operator has decided to pick a fight with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and is asking for donations to help it mount a legal defense against the movie studios.

A British teenager has been sentenced for his part in writing and distributing the Randex worm which turned infected PCs into 'zombies', controlled by spammers to send out vast quantities of unsolicited email.

The creation of such 'bot-nets' has become a prolific weapon in the arsenal of professional spammers and their creation through the distribution of worms and Trojans has become big business for virus writers.

The UK's biggest spammer, Peter Francis Clifford Macrae, has been charged with more offences, including blackmail, fraud and criminal damage.

A 16 year-old Briton was convicted last week for releasing the Randex trojan, which was used to relay spam through infected PCs.

Gregory Aaron Herns, 21, was a 17-year-old computer whiz at an alternative high school in southeast Portland when he hacked into the computer system at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Herns told federal agents he was looking for computer space to store movies he'd downloaded. It took hours for technicians to find the problem, fix it and patch the system's security holes, officials said.

"It would be like clearing a sidewalk full of spectators with a fire hose so you can walk through it," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Nyhus.

A second man has been convicted in the trial that saw a 21-year-old sentenced to the longest ever prison term for a hacking conviction.

Brian Salcedo was convicted earlier this week on hacking charges and sentenced to nine years in jail after hacking into the computer system of a chain of hardware stores after discovering its insecure Wi-Fi network while wardriving.

His accomplice, Adam Botbyl, has been sentenced to 26 months for his part in the hack, according to The Associated Press. The hack was intended to give the men access to customers' credit card details.

A 21-year-old Michigan man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Wednesday in federal court in Charlotte, North Carolina for his role in a failed scheme to steal credit card numbers from the Lowe's chain of home improvement stores by taking advantage of an unsecured wi-fi network at a store in suburban Detroit.

A Canadian man was sentenced to seven years in a U.S. prison this week after admitting he led a sophisticated satellite TV piracy ring that produced and sold thousands of hacked smart cards in the U.S. and Canada.

Martin Mullen, 50, was also ordered to pay DirecTV and its smart card provider NDS Ltd. $24 million in restitution. Mullen pled guilty in a federal court in Tampa, Florida last September to conspiracy to violate anti-piracy laws, and to entering the U.S. illegally after being deported on an unrelated matter years earlier.