Phone companies’ security shaken


As T-Mobile hacker is convicted, AT&T reveals break-in.

A 23-year-old Oregon resident has been sentenced to a year of ‘home detention’, after being convicted of hacking into the servers of mobile phone company

T-Mobile USA

. The man accessed personal details of many

T-Mobile

customers, including precious social security numbers, but claimed his actions were ‘stupid’ rather than malicious. The crime, accessing a protected computer, carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines; the

T-Mobile

hacker, on top of his year at home, was fined $10,000.

Meanwhile, US telecoms giant

AT&T

has revealed that an unknown hacker infiltrated its networks last weekend, and got access to the personal details of up to 19,000 customers of an online store. The store was apparently shut ‘within hours’ of the incident being discovered, and only customers buying broadband equipment were put in jeopardy. The attack is one of many suffered by the company in recent years, exposing over 90 million records stored on their servers to unidentified visitors.

Read more on the

AT&T

hack

here

.

Posted on 31 August 2006 by

Virus Bulletin


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