Ride the Lightning

EVEN A CAVEMAN CAN DO IT: HACKING INTO THE TELECOMS

December 26, 2007

Convicted hacker Robert Moore, who is now in federal prison, says breaking into 15 telecommunications companies and hundreds of businesses worldwide was incredibly easy because of simple IT gaffes. As much as we deal with this truism in forensics and lecture on it non-stop, this is a train that just keeps on chugging down the track to doom. Moore, who pled guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud, laughed in his Information Week interview, telling the reporters that hacking is a piece of cake: "It’s so easy a caveman can do it . . . when you’ve got that many computers at your fingertips, you’d be surprised how many are insecure." Moore said that the biggest insecurity was (what an old refrain) default passwords and that 85% of the time, he got in through routers with default passwords.

So is Moore upset that he’s going to prison? Not so much, according to the self-defined “mega-geek.” He’s just pissed off that they won’t allow him access to a computer. Imagine that.

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