Accused Pentagon Hacker's Online Life

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/28186.html

By Kevin Poulsen
SecurityFocus Online
Posted: 19/11/2002 

Usenet posts show Gary McKinnon was a bit of a phone phreak, knew
where to buy lock picks, and had an early interest in defense
computers. A former employer says he was bored at work.

The British man accused of the most ambitious hack attacks against
Defense Department computers in years was also a fine network
administrator, according to a former co-worker.

A manager at the London-based telecom equipment seller Corporate
Business Technology Ltd. recalls Gary McKinnon as a friendly -- if
unremarkable -- presence at the company, where he provided IT support
for an office of about 50 people. "He was personable, relatively happy
around the office," says the manager, who declined to give his name.  
"You wouldn't have realized that he could do what he did."

McKinnon, now 36, worked for CBT for approximately ten months ending
in late 1999, the company says. He left on good terms. "As I remember
it, he decided to leave because he was bored working here," says the
manager. "But at the time that he left, he didn't have any place to go
to."

On Tuesday (Nov 12, 2002), U.S. officials in Virginia charged McKinnon
with seven felony counts of computer fraud for allegedly penetrating
92 different systems belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, the
Pentagon, and NASA, as well as six computers owned by private
companies and organizations, in a year-long hacking spree that ended
last March.

A related indictment unsealed the same day in New Jersey charges the
Londoner with a September, 2001 attack against U.S. Navy systems at
the Earle Naval Weapons Station that allegedly resulted in the network
of 300 computers being shut down for a week.

The private computers listed in the Virginia indictment are mostly at
traditional easy targets, like public libraries and universities, and
may have been used as cut-outs to cover the hacker's tracks. Gregg
Cannon, IT director at victim-company Tobin International in Texas,
says federal investigators contacted and subpoenaed his company early
this year after a test system outside the company firewall was
compromised and used to attack government computers. "All the
government would tell us is that it was overseas," says Cannon. "He
didn't do any damage."

Diverse Interests

The U.S. is seeking McKinnon's extradition, which McKinnon is fighting
in the U.K.

McKinnon's former co-worker said Wednesday that there was nothing
about the network admin to hint at a future as a civilian infowarrior,
"assuming it was him that did it."

A trail of Usenet messages posted by McKinnon in the late 1990's to
public Internet newsgroups suggests McKinnon had an early interest in
esoteric technological subjects.

Postings in 1997 to the U.K. phone hacking newsgroup alt.ph.uk show
McKinnon, or someone with the same name, offering advice on purchasing
lock picks in the U.K., tips on encrypting files, and hints on
changing the electronic serial numbers in cellular telephones.

A flurry of less subversive posts in December, 1999 from an email
address at Corporate Business Technologies have McKinnon advising
colleagues in Windows-administration newsgroups on a variety of topics
-- most of them security related.

One post from that period hints at an earlier start to McKinnon's
interest in U.S. defense systems than the government has acknowledged.  
The message finds McKinnon advising someone on what brand of intrusion
detection system to buy. He recommends ISS's RealSecure, because "The
US Navy use[s] that and only that ..."

"[B]ut then," McKinnon adds without explanation, "they really need
it."



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