A Maryland man with a grudge against a Connecticut-based patent firm used unsecured wireless networks at homes and businesses in the Washington D.C. area to penetrate the company's computers and deliver untraceable threats and extortion demands, until an FBI surveillance team caught him in the act.
Routine efforts to improve network security could be used against IT managers in court, warned cybercrime attorney Mark Rasch.
Security managers who fail to secure their company's information could be making it harder to prosecute computer crime, said Rasch, who delivered a keynote at the NetSec 2004 conference here this week.
"For trade secrets to be entitled to legal protection, the person holding the trade secret has to demonstrate that they used reasonable efforts to ensure its secrecy," Rasch said.
A U.S. House subcommittee on Thursday approved what would be the first federal law to specifically target Internet spyware.
A US teenager has been fined and sentenced to time in jail after committing fraud via online auction site eBay.
The 19-year-old from California has been sentenced to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of $20,000 after repeatedly offering goods for sale, including mobile phones, collecting payment and never actually sending out any goods to the auction winners.
In a rare wireless hacking conviction, a Michigan man entered a guilty plea Friday in federal court in Charlotte, North Carolina for his role in a 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 Los Angeles court last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by a former enforcer in DirecTV's anti-piracy campaign who claimed he resigned rather than continue to prosecute the company's controversial war against buyers of hacker-friendly smart card equipment.
A Florida man pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington D.C. on Wednesday to charges stemming from his role as one-half of the high-profile hacking team "The Deceptive Duo," responsible for obtaining sensitive information from government systems, and defacing dozens of governmental and private Web sites with patriotically-themed messages exhorting the U.S. to shore up cyber defenses.
A 32-year-old Johannesburg man has been found guilty of loading a virus onto the computers of Edgars, an act which the company claims cost them R20 million and affected up to 700 stores. Because the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act governing what employees may legally do with company computers was not yet in force, Berend Howard of Morningside Manor was charged with malicious damaged to Edcon property. Companies falling under the Edcon umbrella include Edgars, Sales House and Jet Stores.
A Florida man has been charged in federal court in Washington DC for his alleged role as one-half of the high-profile hacking team "The Deceptive Duo," responsible for defacing dozens of governmental and private Web sites with patriotically-themed messages exhorting the U.S. to shore up cyber defenses.
Federal authorities say they managed to pierce the murky underworld of Internet spam e-mails, filing the first criminal charges under the government's new "can spam" legislation.
Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.
At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.
