Cali. Laptop Thief May Get Life in Prison
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A state appeals court this week in California upheld a ruling against a man who broke into the apartment of a woman he met through an online dating service, which may result in a life sentence due to their "three strikes" law.
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A convicted hacker accused of taking over a teenage internet celebrity's MySpace account and demanding nude photos and "phone sex" for its return has been charged in Los Angeles with computer intrusion, making obscene or threatening phone calls, and deleting computer data, in addition to attempted extortion. Federal charges may follow.
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A computer technician who prosecutors said made possible the largest identity theft in US history, surpassing $US50 million ($A71.
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Logged in to check e-mail or the news on one of those hotel business center computers? A Colombian man has been convicted of an identity-theft scheme in which he planted keylogging software on machines around the country, lifting personal information from hundreds of American travelers.
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A US man faces charges after breaking into and taking personal data from T-Mobile's computer system.
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BERKELEY, Calif.) - The personal information of more than a (m) million Californians may have fallen into the hands of a computer hacker.
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Todd Marinovich, the former Los Angeles Raiders quarterback whose career ended in a mire of drug abuse, is facing a possible prison term after a weekend arrest in Orange County.
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By Jim Provance, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio  Jun. 16--COLUMBUS -- A thief made away with a state government computer backup "storage device" containing the names and COLUMBUS numbers of more than 64,000 state employees, prompting Gov. Ted Strickland to issue an alert yesterday.
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Last year a man in Canada was arrested for downloading child pornography onto his laptop, but he used someone else's wireless access point to access the illegal material.
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A California man pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he shut down the datacenter responsible for managing the state&#39;s electrical supply.Lonnie Denison, 33, is now facing as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine after admitting to breaking a glass cover and hitting the emergency &quot;off&quot; switch at the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) data center in Folsom, California, on April 15. By doing so, he shut off the power in the datacenter. He was formerly a contract Unix system administrator at the center.Cal-ISO is the nonprofit organization that manages California&#39;s power. By knocking these systems offline, Denison effectively cut the state off from the energy market, leaving California vulnerable to blackout conditions. No blackouts occurred, however, because the data center went down at 11:23 p.m. on a Sunday -- a time when electricity demand is typically at a lull. &quot;If this deliberate shut-off had occurred in the morning ... things would have been far more severe,&quot; wrote Matthew Amant, the California Highway Patrol officer assigned to investigate the incident, in an affidavit.It&#39;s not clear why Denison would have wanted to flip the switch on California&#39;s power, but according to U.S. attorneys, he was in a dispute with co-workers and just minutes before the incident had discovered that his computer privileges had been revoked.Prosecutors allege that he followed up the power outage by sending an e-mail bomb threat the next day to an unnamed Cal-ISO employee, saying, &quot;Hey, at one point I respected you ... you have a new kid. So this is only because of him. Get out before the timer expires. Not long now. Take care.&quot;Following this threat, Cal-ISO evacuated about 500 employees from all three of its Folsom campus buildings, transferring control of the grid to a second control center.That same day Denison spoke with a friend, admitting that he had tried to &quot;shut off the power grid,&quot; according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.The Sunday night incident knocked the data center down for about two hours, but it took 20 computer technicians about seven hours to fully restore the system. The total cost of the outage is estimated at $14,000.Denison, of Sacramento, California, is set to be sentenced on Feb. 29, 2008, in federal court.
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A teacher is told he faces jail after being found guilty of using his computer to access child pornography.
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In Dayton, a state employee returns to work to find a $2,000 computer stolen. In Cleveland, someone walks into an unlocked office and takes a $2,200 laptop belonging to the state auditor's office.
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Time to call the credit bureaus? Almost 1.4 million records containing the personal information of Californians likely stolen.
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MANILA, Philippines - It looks like prison life wasn't too tough for some of the Philippines' most notorious inmates. Authorities said Monday they had seized late-model flat-screen TVs, DVD players and stereos, assorted firearms and mobile phones from jail cells in the national penitentiary compound in the Manila suburb of Muntinlupa...
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The owner of one of the nation's largest Internet software piracy Web sites has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
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A top Democratic fundraiser wanted as a fugitive in California turned himself in Friday to face a grand theft charge.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;