Teen Hacker 'Coolio' Pleads Guilty

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://news.excite.com/news/ap/010102/12/hacker-plea

By STEPHEN FROTHINGHAM
Associated Press Writer
Updated 12:39 PM ET January 2, 2001

OSSIPEE, N.H. (AP) - A teen-age hacker who was briefly linked to a
highly publicized series of hacking attacks against major companies
pleaded guilty Tuesday to three misdemeanors.

Dennis Moran, 18, who went by the name of "Coolio," broke into
rsa.com, operated by Internet security company RSA Security Inc., and
dare.com, an anti-drug site connected to the Los Angeles Police
Department.

If a judge approves a plea agreement, Moran will serve nine months to
a year in jail and pay $5,000 in restitution to each of three victims.

Wearing a hooded sweat shirt and jeans, Moran said little during the
half-hour hearing in Carroll County Superior Court and declined to
talk to reporters afterward.

"I feel the disposition is fair for the crimes I committed," he told
Judge James O'Neill.

Prosecutor Michael Delaney disclosed that Moran also got onto the Web
sites of four military bases, three Army, one Air Force. Getting onto
the sites potentially gave him access to classified information, but
he never actually accessed anything classified, Delaney said.

Moran, who lives with his father in Wolfeboro, will be formally
sentenced this spring after a presentencing investigation. He pleaded
guilty to unauthorized access to computer systems.

He will remain free on bail until his sentencing. He may use computers
provided he does not do anything illegal with them.

The break-in onto the DARE site occurred at about the same time as
publicized disruptions of major sites such as Yahoo! and eBay. Moran
had allegedly bragged about those attacks but later said he had only
been joking. A Canadian teen-ager who uses the computer name
"mafiaboy" was later charged with disrupting eBay and Yahoo!

When he was first identified, Moran spoke freely to reporters. He was
depicted as a polite, intelligent teen who dropped out of high school
because he was bored and read Tolstoy after investigators confiscated
the family's computers. He soon changed his mind about interviewers
and has remained silent since.

He went onto the DARE site twice a year ago, defacing it with pro-drug
slogans and images, including one depicting Donald Duck with a
hypodermic syringe in his arm.

The Web site of RSA - which proclaims itself "the most trusted name in
e-security" - was linked to another hacked computer at a university in
South America. There, a nearly duplicate hoax site proclaimed: "Trust
us with your data! Praise Allah!"

The hacker left a message, "owned by coolio," and derided RSA's
earlier announcement that it had developed a countermeasure to the
types of attacks that had been launched against eBay.

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