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T-Moblile Cracker Pleads Guilty

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-directly-to-jail dept.

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."

2 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Punish him constructively by [cx] · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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]

  2. Re:Summary is misleading... by digitalchinky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 :-)