In a rare wireless hacking prosecution, federal officials this week accused two Michigan men of repeatedly cracking the Lowe's chain of home improvement stores' nationwide network from a 1995 Pontiac Grand Prix parked outside a suburban Detroit store.
Paul Timmins, 22, and Adam Botbyl, 20, were charged Monday with penetrating and intentionally damaging a Lowe's system in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Two men repeatedly hacked into the Lowe's home improvement chain's national computer system, getting access to credit card and other information, the federal government says.
The Waterford men sat in a car in the parking lot of a Lowe's store in Southfield and used a wireless network to enter the computer system from Oct. 25 through Friday, prosecutors say.
The purpose of the hacking is unclear, the government says.
The recording industry filed 80 more federal lawsuits around the country Thursday against computer users it said were illegally sharing music files across the Internet.
Those 80 people were among 204 who had been threatened with lawsuits earlier this month by the Washington-based Recording Industry Association of America unless they contacted the trade association to discuss a financial settlement.
The RIAA said the remaining 124 people had approached music industry lawyers about settling the claims.
A teenage computer student has pleaded guilty to hacking into IT systems at an American nuclear weapons laboratory.
Joseph James McElroy, 18, a first-year undergraduate at Exeter University, admitted hacking into 17 computer systems at the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory at a hearing at Bow Street Magistrates court in London on Friday.
The court heard that the teenager hacked into Fermilab computers on 25 June 2002 and used them to store hundreds of gigabytes of copyrighted film and music files.
An Ohio woman whose credit card fraud schemes began to unravel when she unwittingly spammed an off-duty FBI computer crime agent pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge Tuesday, and potentially faces years in prison.
A British court cleared a teenager on Friday of hacking into the computer of the U.S. port of Houston, Texas, after the youth testified his own computer had been taken over by someone else to mount the attack.
Aaron Caffrey, 19, could have faced up to five years in prison in what would have been a landmark computer hacking case. "Hacking" is the term for using a computer to break into another computer network.
The UK teenager accused of launching a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the Port of Houston's IT systems was found not guilty at Southwark Crown Court on Friday of unauthorized modification of computer material.
Even though both the defense and prosecution acknowledged that the attack had originated from Caffrey's computer, the defendant claimed his computer had been taken over by a hacker using a Trojan Horse program.
Britain passed legislation on Friday to implement the controversial European Copyright Directive. As well as giving new protections to DRM and anti-copying technologies, it creates an offence that could, at least in theory, be committed by using a P2P service like KaZaA.
It may not be the intention of the Government, nor of its Copyright Directorate, the Patent Office department responsible for drawing up the implementing regulations; but that does not change the fact that this will be written into our laws.
Convicted hackers and virus writers soon will face significantly harsher penalties under new guidelines that dictate how the government punishes computer crimes.
Starting in November, federal judges will begin handing out the expanded penalties, which were developed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Congress ordered the changes last year, saying that sentences for convicted computer criminals should reflect the seriousness of their crimes.
The head of an Internet security company that claimed to have found dangerous loopholes in U.S. military computers was arrested and indicted Monday on six counts of conspiracy to access military, government and private computers, said U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.
