Hacker

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Legendary computer hacker Kevin Mitnick's two years as a federal fugitive did not end because he got too greedy or careless.He got caught because he messed with the wrong person -- someone as familiar with the dark corners of cyberspace as he was.Tsutomu Shimomura, a top computer security expert at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, had followed Mitnick's exploits with interest, but he decided to get personally involved in the case --...

"Money: Who Has How Much and Why," by Andrew Hacker. Scribner. 254 pages. $25.Andrew Hacker gives campus-based intellectualism a gooname. He uses numbers to enlighten instead of obscure, making sure the statistics come alive by illustrating their inexorable messages with cases involving real people.His prose is filled with active verbs and metaphors, instead of the passive voice and jargon frequently churned out by academics. He is willing to tackle a topic across disciplinary lines, conducting research from the Queens College political science department to shed light on a topic usually left to economists.

The Toronto Blue Jays are certainly happy to be at the 90th World Series, although most of their players say the thrill is not quite so dramatic as it was a year ago.The Philadelphia Phillies are thrilled to be here, because no one outside of the Delaware Valley gave them a chance to beat the Atlanta Braves. Who can't like another worst-to-first story, anyway?But nobody could have been as happy to walk onto the artificial turf under Toronto's SkyDome as were Rich Hacker and Steve Palermo.

A former Maryland man pleaded guilty yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to two wire fraud charges in the theft and exchange of secret computer codes with other computer hackers, some of them members of a group known as the Legion of Doom.Leonard Rose Jr., who once lived in Middletown and now lives near Chicago, is to receive up to one year in prison at sentencing June 10 under the terms of the plea agreement on charges in Baltimore and in Chicago accepted yesterday by Judge J. Frederick Motz.

WASHINGTON -- A computer hacker vandalized the home page of the Department of Justice on Friday night, posting obscenities and anti-government graffiti, a department official said yesterday.The Justice Department's site on the World Wide Web was shut down early yesterday after members of the public called to report the electronic break-in, said a department spokesman, Joe Krovisky.The site will remain shut while the department's technical experts assess its security, he said.Krovisky said the system the hacker broke into was separate from the department's internal computer system, which contains highly sensitive information about criminal cases and investigations.

Computer hacker Leonard Rose Jr., 32, of Middletown, has been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison and three years of probation afterward for sending stolen UNIX source code to another hacker in Illinois in a case that is part of continuing government crackdown on computer crimes.Rose, once a member of a nationwide hackers' group called the Legion of Doom, pleaded guilty in March to two counts of wire fraud.His case in U.S. District Court in Baltimore and a state case in Illinois that was transferred here were connected to the illegal exchange of the UNIX source code owned by Atlantic Telephone & Telegraph Co. and Bell Laboratories.

Clarification In Thursday's editions of The Sun, an article on this week's computer hacker attacks reported that Datek was one of the Web sites affected. Datek officials initially said their site had suffered service disruptions that might have been caused by the hackers. They later said the problems resulted not from the attacks, but from a malfunction at one of Datek's Internet service providers. Hackers continued to bedevil prominent Internet sites yesterday, flooding them with enough messages to cause temporary but potentially costly service delays.

SEATTLE - Federal agents here have cracked a Russian computer-hacking ring that prosecutors say victimized dozens of e-commerce businesses in 10 states through extortion and the theft of thousands of credit card numbers. Two young hackers have been arrested and indicted after the FBI set up a bogus Internet-security company, called "Invita," and let the men hack into it, authorities said. Then, they lured the men to the United States to apply for jobs. An amended 20-count indictment from a Seattle grand jury this month identifies the men as Alexey Ivanov, 20, and Vasiliy Gorshkov, 25. Prosecutors say they might be linked to hundreds of crimes, including the highly publicized theft of 15,700 credit card numbers from Western Union in Denver in September.

LOS ANGELES -- Kevin Lee Poulsen could tap your telephone.He was so adept at manipulating Pacific Bell computers that he was able to spy on FBI agents while they spied on crooks.And before his 1991 arrest, he won a Porsche and some $21,000 by using computers to rig phone-in contests at three Los Angeles radio stations.Now just out of prison, this 30-year-old computer wiz finds himself stuck in a computerless world. Having spent a record five years behind bars for hacking, Poulsen is barred from getting anywhere near his beloved machines at home and on the job for the next three years.

Charlie Hacker is still gobbling life with a ladle. He's 82, a crumpled back has reduced his once six-foot-plus frame to five feet and change, and he's licked cancer. He can't understand why everyone runs around trying to "squeeze two lifetimes into one" - but he's one to talk. Hacker, himself, can't sit still, or accept that he has the option to relax. "Gosh, there's so much out there to be gleaned," he says, sounding like a regular Natty Bumpo, the early American literary figure agog at the wonders of the New World.