From: newsbytes@clarinet.com (NB-LON) Subject: London Newspaper Runs Old "Superhacker" Story 01/03/95 Date: 3 Jan 95 20:44:22 GMT LONDON, ENGLAND, 1995 JAN 3 (NB) -- As the UK started back to work today after the long Christmas and New Year shutdown, readers of the Independent newspaper were treated to the banner headline "British Boy Raided US Defense Secrets." The curious thing about the story was that none of the other nationalpapers or news wires carried any reports. On investigation, Newsbytes discovered why -- the story dates back to July of last year, and briefly resurfaced in early November on the US news wires. According to the Independent, a 16-year-old British boy has been arrested in connection with a alleged unauthorized intrusions into the US government's computers and "was able to watch secret communications between US agents in North Korea during the crisis over nuclear inspections last spring." The story is quite correct, except that the boy in question was arrested last July, when the original story broke. Commenting on the story, Peter Sommer, a leading security consultant and a senior with the Computer Research Center at the London School of Economics, said that it smacked of the British Telecom secrets case of late November,also reported in the Independent. That story, as reported by Newsbytes, turned out to be something of a non-event when the hacker, who posted details of top secret files on BT's ex-directory computer "across the Internet," turned out to be Steve Fleming, a Scottish freelance journalist who worked as a temp for BT in the summer and broke BT's own security rules by downloading files from the BT's Customer Service System (CSS) computer, then mailed them -- across the Internet -- to other people. "I'm amazed at the Independent running yet another story involving the Internet," Sommer told Newsbytes, adding that it is "a very old story. It seems that all they have to do is to work up a story about a hacking attempt, whether successful or not, and weave in a story about the Internet, and it's a headline story." Ken Young, newly installed editor of Communicate, a leading industry communications magazine in London, and a veteran of the UK communications industry for more than a decade, told Newsbytes that the story seemed a little thin. "It looks like another hacking story except that (the newspaper) has written in something about the Internet, and bingo! You've got a report that the information was accessible to 32 million users on the Internet," he said. Sommer, meanwhile, told Newsbytes that he had made his own discreet inquiries about the story with high level authorities when it broke last summer. "There are two problems with this case. Firstly, any lawyer worth his salt would invoke Section 69 of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act," he said. This Act, Sommer explained, requires that, before a computer can be considered as admissible evidence in court, the owner of the computer must issue a certificate of correct working. This, he said, could not be issued, as a casual user of a PC would be unable to make such a certification. Sommer went on to explain that the second reason that the case could be problematic for the prosecution was "that the lawyer would ask the court for full disclosure of all affected files on victim's host computers," which, since such files are almost certain to be classified in the US, could not be revealed in a British courtroom. The facts surrounding the case, as reported by Newsbytes, were that the 16-year-old -- operating under the code name of Data Stream -- was one of several who gained unauthorized access to the US defense computer network in late 1993 and early 1994 and that some files were deleted. At the time, press reports said that as many as a million passwords were compromised, and may have compromised the military readiness of the United States. The case has, Newsbytes understands, been fully investigated by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) although details of the report of the investigation by the USAF OSI are classified. Originally, the press reports of the time speculated whether the youth would be the first under-18 to be extradited to the US to face charges. It seems that, following last summer's arrest and submission of the report to the Crown Prosecution Service that the case is being quietly shuffled into a file because of the practical problems in pursuing a prosecution.