British man to be extradited for US military hacks

NEWS

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday indicted a British man who allegedly hacked into military computer systems and shut them down in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Gary McKinnon, a 36-year-old former systems administrator from London, was charged by a grand jury in New Jersey with intentionally damaging a federal computer system, according to a statement released by the US Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia. McKinnon is believed to have attacked the Earle Naval Weapons Station, a US Navy command centre responsible for supplying munitions to the Atlantic fleet, three times between April 2001 and September 2001. During the final attack on 23 September 2001, the DOJ alleges McKinnon deleted key files necessary to power some computers on the network. "This was a grave intrusion into a vital military system computer system at a time when we, as a nation, had to summon all of our defences against further attack," Assistant US Attorney Scott S. Christie said in the statement. Representatives from US Navy would not comment on the indictment. The US Attorney's office also indicted McKinnon on seven counts of unauthorised access and damage to computer systems for his hack of nearly 100 computers, mainly military systems. The second indictment charged McKinnon with breaking into systems belonging to the US Army, US Navy, the US Air Force, the US Department of Defense and NASA, as well as six corporate computers. Altogether, McKinnon allegedly caused approximately $900,000 in damage. Both indictments were handed down on Tuesday morning. The US Attorney's office in Virginia will be taking lead on the case, a representative from that office said. After McKinnon was charged with the network break-in, the DOJ worked to try McKinnon in the United States, said Judy Prue, a spokeswoman for the Britain's National High-Tech Crime Unit. "It was decided that he would be extradited to the US," Prue said. "Technically, we had to de-arrest this guy." The DOJ announced plans to extradite McKinnon on Tuesday afternoon. The Associated Press reported some details of the investigation on Monday. Online vandals have often used military systems as hacking targets. The Pentagon, for example, has cited as many as 250,000 attacks in a single year. The attacks do succeed, on occasion. In May of last year, government contractor Exigent International acknowledged that one or more hackers broke into a government server that contained satellite software and stole code. Evidence led investigators to an email service in Sweden, where the hackers apparently stashed the code. The culprits were never apprehended. In 1997, two California teenagers and a trio of Israeli hackers were arrested for hacking into Pentagon servers. Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum, then 18 years old, and his two teenage accomplices weren't extradited yet were prosecuted by local authorities. The United States rarely extradites cybercriminals; the process has proven to be extremely slow in the cases that do call for extradition. In May, two citizens of Kazakhstan were extradited from Britain more than 20 months after their arrest in a London hotel room on charges of unauthorised computer access and extortion. Oleg Zezov and Igor Yarimaka allegedly sent several email messages to the founder of financial information company Bloomberg and now mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, demanding that he pay $200,000 in exchange for information on how the duo infiltrated the Bloomberg system. Law enforcement officials have also tried other methods to snatch foreign hackers suspected of cybercrimes. In November 2000, two alleged Russian hackers were lured to Seattle in a sting operation after FBI agents grabbed evidence from a server in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Authorities from that province filed charges against the FBI for the "hack" earlier this year. News.com's Margaret Kane contributed to this report. ZDNet UK's Matt Loney contributed from London.

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