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Swedish Man Indicted for Allegedly Hacking NASA, Cisco

‘A Swedish man with a record of hacking has been indicted in the U.S.’ -

The man accused of hacking computer networks used by Cisco Systems and NASA has been indicted by a federal grand jury.  

Philip Gabriel Pettersson, a 21-year-old Swedish man, has been blamed by the U.S. government of stealing programming information from the U.S. space agency and Cisco, with five counts of intrusion and trade secret theft charges pending.  The incidents, which both occurred in 2004, led to Pettersson being interviewed by the FBI in 2004, though he denied any involvement in the network intrusions.

Specifically, he allegedly compromised computer code related to internet traffic from the NASA Ames Research Center and NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division’s networks while operating under the hacking name “Stakkato.”

When he was just 19 years old, Pettersson was convicted and fined $25,000 after being found guilty of breaching the computer networks of three different Swedish universities.

The Swedish government has a policy of not extraditing its citizens to face charges in other nations, but the Swedish courts can prosecute suspects based on foreign courts.  Unless he ventures outside of Sweden and is captured, the U.S. government will never officially get their hands on him.

The U.S. government has faced a growing number of foreign-based attacks, although most of the intrusions aren’t believed to be led by motives related to financial theft or espionage.  However, security experts warn that organized cyber rings bankrolled by the Chinese and Russian governments could compromise vital networks used by both the government and private companies.

© 2009, DailyTech

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