Man Gets 10 Years For VoIP Hacking 149
angry tapir writes "A US court has sentenced a Venezuelan man to 10 years in prison for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service. Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served."
Computer Fraud and Wire Fraud, Some Hacking (Score:5, Informative)
"Man gets 10 years for felony commercial theft of service".
I believe the actual charges were one count of computer fraud and one count of wire fraud [wikipedia.org]. Which has a pretty serious maximum punishment.
There. FTFY.
No hacking involved here; nothing to see; move along.
Well, I don't know if I'd agree there was no hacking involved. It sounds like he used someone in Washington state named Moore to run port scans on all the big routers for VoIP hardware. Moore (serving two years) would then brute force attack these routers for login information. Pena dumped Moore twenty large and then acted as a salesman. After selling the phone service, Pena would reprogram the vulnerable networks so they would accept his rogue telephone traffic. Pena didn't seem to do much hacking, Moore was apparently just a brute force hacker that preyed on stupid VoIP companies who used four number prefixes as passwords.
I think the general public considers port scanning and brute force attacks to be hacking. At least the news reports it as such.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Informative)
Really without knowing where the calls were going to it's not really possible to put a figure on the damage. If it's geographic numbers in the USA your figure is probbablly about right, if it's mobiles in caller pays countries it could easilly be ten time higher and if it's premium rate numbers, satphones or shithole countries it could be much higher still.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Informative)
That's wrong - deportations usually involve hearings, but not always, and they usually don't involve convictions.