Law and Order

A US court has indicted a Romanian hacker accused of conspiring to steal $10m of computer equipment from Ingram Micro.

Calin Mateias, operating under the name Dr Mengele, allegedly hacked into the computer company?s systems and placed fraudulent orders for goods.

When the Ingram Micro subsequently blocked orders going to Romania, Mateias allegedly found five Americans and used their addresses to have the computer equipment sent to.

They have also been charged at the hearing in Los Angeles.

If convicted, Mateias could face up to 90 years in prison.

Three Michigan men have pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired to hack into the national computer system of the Lowe's home improvement chain to steal credit card information, federal authorities said Wednesday.
Under plea agreements, Brian Salcedo, Adam Botbyl and Paul Timmins pleaded guilty to just a handful of the 16 charges each man originally faced, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Federal authorities yesterday charged an online advertiser in Florida with tapping into the computer system of a large database marketer in Arkansas and
stealing "vast amounts of personal information" about Americans in what they described as one of the largest network intrusions in recent memory.

Notorious spammer Scott Richter has been slapped with a $40,000 fine while NY State
initially sought a $20 million judgement against him. $40,000 fine and $10,000 in investative costs doesn't sound as a big deal, at least to him. NY State initially wanted a $20 million judgement against Richter but it has settled for peanuts. He wasn't even forced into admitting he had done anything wrong.

Richter allegedly used a network of 500 compromised computers to send millions of junk email to Hotmail users. He, of course, denies and such wrongdoing.

A Florida man who ran a company called Snipermail.com Inc. was indicted on Wednesday on charges of breaking into and stealing vast amounts of personal information from Acxiom Corp.'s (ACXM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) computer database in 2002 and 2003, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Scott Levine, 45, of Boca Raton, Florida, was charged in a 144-count indictment with conspiracy, unauthorized access of a computer, access device fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice, department officials said.

A US man has been charged with hacking into government computers, including Department of Defense machines. Rob Lyttle, 20, was indicted with hacking government computers and defacing government websites in April 2002. The US government estimates the cost of repairing the damage at $70,000. It is alleged that Lyttle got access to non-public Defense Department computers including the worldwide logistics system, Defense Logistics Information Service, in Battle Creek, Michigan. The maximum sentence is 10 years in prison and $250,000 fine.

Adrian Lamo, known as the "homeless" hacker, built a reputation for hacking into the networks of some of America's largest companies and then offering to help, for free, fix the security vulnerabilities that made his incursions possible.
Lamo was indicted for breaking into computer systems at The New York Times. In January, he pleaded guilty to those charges. On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced him to two years probation, with six months to be served in home detention, says Lamo's federal public defender, Sean Hecker.

The Dutch Department of Justice yesterday suffered bitter defeat in a court case against thirteen West African men, who allegedly sent thousands of 419 or advance fraud fee letters through the Amsterdam cable network of UPC. The court ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to link the suspects individually to the scams.

An Internet bookseller, which also operated an Internet service provider (ISP), has been sentenced in federal court for intercepting electronic communications and the unauthorized possession of password files.

The case against Emeryville, Calif.-based Alibris, which is thought to be the first of its type, involved one company intercepting e-mail from Amazon.com and others to book dealers without the authorization of the dealers concerned.

A self-claimed hacker was jailed on Monday 28th June, 2004. Simon Jones (25) conned porn
site bossed into believing he had access to their whole user database. His ruse backfired when US secret service agents and officers from the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit carried out a dawn raid on the house he shared with his parents in Southampton, resulting in his arrest and eventual imprisonment.