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T-Moblile Cracker Pleads Guilty
hackajar writes "The Register is reporting Nicholas Lee Jacobsen plead guilty to cracking into T-Mobile's phones. He was picked up in mid October of last year in the "Operation Firewall" sweep by the FBI. He faces "maximum five years' prison and a $250,000 fine" according to the site."
Sorry if this sounds a little naive, but how would you prevent prisoner rape, short of placing everyone into solitary confinement? Isn't it kind of unavoidable in that kind of environment? How do other countries handle the problem?
Make him work unpaid with only room and board as a slave for T-Mobile as a security technician.
Oh yeah..slavery...
I guess it's not such a good idea, but without the bad past of slavery, but incarceration is just a waste of money, when he could be using his "talent" positively. By forcing them to atone for their crimes perhaps they will learn the error of their ways by dealing with (in this case) people trying to crack the same security network he is now trying to secure.
Monitor him, which will probably cost less than the prison fees. He is not a danger to society, he is just simply someone who overstepped their legal boundary. I believe prison should be for violent criminals. Not that he will go to a real tough prison.
But if he screws up in the program outside of prison as rehabilitation, then he would be sent to a maximum security prison to serve the sentence to the end.
[cx]
Maximum of five years and a $250,000 fine is the maximum for a single felony. From the previous article:
:(
The same source also offers an explanation for the secrecy surrounding the case: the Secret Service, the source says, has offered to put the hacker to work, pleading him out to a single felony, then enlisting him to catch other computer criminals in the same manner in which he himself was caught. The source says that Jacobsen, facing the prospect of prison time, is favorably considering the offer.
It seems that a surefire way to get a job tracking down criminals for the government is to get arrested for committing crimes, a bummer for us regular folk
The article doesn't say anything about how he did it so it might well have been Mitnick style "hacking" , involving tricking people over the phone to give out passwords (also called social engineering which he wrote a book on).
So this might have been a confidence hack rather than a techie hack, although I admit I don't know which it was...
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
Uhhhm, yes, the _crackers_ that crack viruses deserve no respect. Uhhhm, yes, the crackers that expose mal/spyware deserve no respect. Yes, the crackers that crack commercial drivers to find out how hardware should be programmed deserve no respect. Etc, to infinity.
Perhaps the easiest way to access the cellular network is via the microwave link they normally have on each cell site. The transmission from there is typically just a standard T1, 24 channels, few bits of overhead - a couple of channels handle the SS7, the rest are devoted to the (unencrypted) vocoders from each active mobile telephone.
:-)
You can learn a lot just from the SS7 packet stream - including text messages and phone numbers, imsi's and other data (SS7 can get pretty complicated, it has a standard, but phone companies usually twist it a little for their own usage)
There are codecs available online for most transmissions - GSM is usually a 16kbps signal, bust it out and it rasters at around 180 bits wide (from memory) - hook on to the sinc and feed it in to your demux real time - There are probably off the shelf scanners that do all of this these days.
Those small microwave dishes are either pointed at an exchange, or another cell site - find one going to an exchange and you'll get more data to sift through. They transmit at around about 2GHz so you'll need a receiver, downconverter, modem, and some type of capture card for your trusty little portable Pee Cee.
Not cheap, but not impossible. (Make sure to buy two of each or you'll be marked as a 'spy' or terrorist straight off the bat) All of this stuff can fit in to one of those silver metal camera cases.
I'm not making any of this up either
Even Soviet GULAGs allowed them (albeit, very rarely and only to spouses).
They should be a privilege, of course, to be -- like all other privileges -- denied as a punishment, when warranted...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"It is one thing to crack into a network. Stealing social security numbers and personal photos is another, however."
Yes, it is. One is burglary; the other is copyright infringement.