Romanian hacker charged over US security breach
Iain Thomson, vnunet.com, 04 Dec 2006
Victor Faur faces 54 years in prison after breaking into NASA computers
A federal grand jury has indicted a Romanian hacker on 10 charges of breaking into computers owned by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Goddard Space Flight Center, Sandia National Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory.
Victor Faur, 26, of Arad in Romania, is the alleged leader of a hacking group called the 'WhiteHat Team' accused of targeting the servers "because they were so secure".
Once inside, Faur reconfigured some systems to act as chat rooms for his team and stole passwords to gain further access.
He and the other team members also caused screens to be displayed to users informing them that the machines had been hacked.
"The compromised government computers were used to collect and process data from spacecraft in Earth orbit and in deep space, to evaluate new scientific technologies, and to collect, store and analyse other scientific data," said Thom Mrozek of the Los Angeles Attorney's Office.
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