British man admits U.S. military hacking

News Emporium ^ | 7/27/2005

[Hadean]

LONDON, July 27 (UPI) -- A London man has admitted hacking into the U.S. military computer system to prove the existence of UFOs and point out security loopholes, his lawyer said.

Gary McKinnon, 39, was fighting extradition from Britain to face claims he illegally accessed 97 U.S. government computers and caused $645,000 in damage during a year of hacking.

Attorney Karen Todner said McKinnon's main aim was to prove that UFOs exist.

"His motivation was firstly in relation to that, and secondly in relation to exposing the lack of security in relation to the American system," Todner told Sky News.

"He doesn't deny that he did infiltrate their computer system," Todner said.

[Mulch]

Well Did he prove UFO's exist or not?

[sgtbono2002]

Security may have been bad , but they caught his ass.

[LTCJ]

Well Did he prove UFO's exist or not?

Huh?
Oh, you mean IFOs. Try to keep up.

[tucker93]

Instead of hacking into the US military computers, why didn't he just tune into a webstream of Art Bell?

[petpeeve]

Yeah...but it took what, a year to catch him? Security must be semi-lax...unless the aliens told them to ride it out a bit longer....

[petpeeve]

Yeah...but it took what, a year to catch him? Security must be semi-lax...unless the aliens told them to ride it out a bit longer....

[IamConservative]

Google is about the best hacking tool ever invented. The advanced searches use a quasi query language that allows you to search for about anything. I messed around with it for awhile one evening and was soon viewing the student records for a Midwestern High School. They are just sitting there in plain public view because the web server is not configured properly.

It is trule dumbfounding how much private information can be seen in the internet. All you need to be a crook/hacker is the bad intent and a 30 minute lesson on google.

[MD_Willington_1976]

maybe they gave him just enough rope to hang himself...eh?

[Marine_Uncle]

Good for him. Booo on our stupid military folks in all branches that where conned into thinking NT and newer window dressing front ends to Microsoft DOS operating system where wise choices. NT ten years back and I am sure today in it's new forms could not pass the orange book requirements for security. They had options with many variants of UNIX systems then quite stable Linux distributions but did not go that route. Now we read about some hacker, getting into their systems and hacking em. Tough luck. Well designed secure OPS's, require a lot of work and wisdom. As most companies world wide etc., folks simply do not hire folks that know what they are doing, and the result is always the same, hacked, destroyed systems.