Computer Crime

Los Angeles County voters will soon select a new district attorney, and it likely will be their most consequential vote in years. It is hard to overstate the role that the top prosecutor of the nation's most populous county will have as California completely reinvents its justice system. Residents must demand a D.A. who will do his or her utmost to keep them safe, while at the same time embracing reform and ensuring smarter, and less costly, punishment and supervision of nonviolent criminals.

Los Angeles County voters will soon select a new district attorney, and it likely will be their most consequential vote in years. It is hard to overstate the role that the top prosecutor of the nation's most populous county will have as California completely reinvents its justice system. Residents must demand a D.A. who will do his or her utmost to keep them safe, while at the same time embracing reform and ensuring smarter, and less costly, punishment and supervision of nonviolent criminals.

I'm sick of viruses. I'm even sicker of the weasels who program them. Starting at midnight tonight, the so-called Columbus Day virus (also known as the Datacrime virus) will allegedly spring to life to destroy all the hard disk data on thousands of IBM-compatible personal computers. Picture someone sneaking into your office and torching every item in your files--letters, reports, memos. Everything. Multiply that by thousands and you have computerdom's equivalent to Hurricane Hugo.

The crisis began when college basketball fans downloaded a free March Madness application to their smart phones. The app hid spyware that stole passwords, intercepted e-mails and created havoc. Soon 60 million cellphones were dead. The Internet crashed, finance and commerce collapsed, and most of the nation's electric grid went dark. White House aides discussed putting the Army in American cities. That, spiced up with bombs and hurricanes, formed the doomsday scenario when 10 former White House advisors and other top officials joined forces Tuesday in a rare public cyber war game designed to highlight the potential vulnerability of the nation's digital infrastructure to crippling attack.

When it comes to data diddling, logic bombing, malicious hacking and other everyday forms of computer crime, there is no lack of laws on the books. Even that most sexy, state-of-the-art technological curse, the computer virus, may well be addressed--if not specifically cited--in state and federal criminal statutes, experts say. Successful prosecutions, however, are a different story, tending to decrease dramatically as the sophistication of the electronic misdeed increases.

Computer crime is booming and few people are doing enough to protect themselves against assaults ranging from stolen laptops to high-tech Internet heists worth millions, a San Francisco-based watchdog group said. In its third-annual survey, the Computer Security Institute said 520 specialists polled at U.S. corporations, government agencies, financial institutions and universities reported that the wired world was becoming increasingly dangerous.

The corporate war against computer crime has come into the open. Executives are stepping up efforts to stop computer hackers and disgruntled employees from manipulating their data processing systems to embezzle funds, uncover secrets and destroy data. Among other things, security-conscious businesses are installing sophisticated "access control" gadgetry, bringing in special consultants and working more closely with other companies and law enforcement authorities.

A teen-ager pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges he used his home computer to make telephone bomb threats to a school and a restaurant and to tie up the phone lines of two law enforcement agencies. The 17-year-old high school student from San Gabriel pleaded guilty in Pasadena Juvenile Court to two felony counts of making a false bomb report and one felony count of obtaining telephone services by fraud. Deputy Dist. Atty.

It won't take another salvo of overly broad and breathless laws from Congress to confront crime on the worldwide computer web known as the Internet. Good old-fashioned police work and statutes already on the books will suffice in almost all cases. A law broken is a law broken, even if that occurs in cyberspace. Take, for example, the downloading of pornography from the Net into one's home computer. Yes, some think that's a problem, but it isn't one that would be solved by Sen. James J.

Convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick and a man investigators say was his accomplice in a computer crime scheme were arraigned Monday on 25 counts of computer fraud and other charges stemming from a two-year "hacking spree." Mitnick and his longtime friend, Lewis DePayne, both pleaded not guilty in U.S.

A French judge issued an arrest warrant Monday for cyclist Floyd Landis, disgraced and stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title because of doping, in connection with a computer hacking case that occurred as he defended himself. The court wants to question Landis about allegations that he or someone involved with the cyclist hacked into the computer system of the French national anti-doping lab. Landis on Monday denied he hacked anything and said no one has served any warrant against him, though he wasn't sure whether his former coach, Arnie Baker, had received one. It was allegedly a computer registered to Baker that is associated with the case.

For U.S. military firms, the latest revelations of highly sophisticated hacker attacks on Google Inc. are highlighting a new reality, and a potentially lucrative business: The battlefield is shifting to cyberspace. Google's admission last week that it and other large companies were infiltrated by cyber-spies is bolstering prospects for major military contractors that in recent years have been intensifying their focus from developing weapons to defending computer systems and networks.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

"Your Honourable institute is invited," read the e-mail sent a few days ago to Sharon Hom, director of Human Rights in China, urging her participation in the eighth international summit of nongovernmental organizations. Hom immediately smelled a rat. The stilted wording and a few misspellings alerted her that the invite to this purported summit in "California, USA" was just the latest ploy to trick her into opening an e-mail attachment meant to compromise her computer. For years, cyber attacks have targeted human rights advocates and others critical of China, including academics, journalists, Tibetan groups, supporters of the Uighur minority and the banned Falun Gong movement -- in fact, anybody whose work might have irked the government.

Bouquets were laid in front of Google Inc.'s headquarters in China on Wednesday, a show of support for a company whose threat to exit the country rather than be party to more censorship is a dramatic shot across the bow of the Chinese Communist Party. But while Chinese cyberspace was awash with chatter about Google's gambit, state-controlled media downplayed the story, reporting that Google had been a victim of cyber attacks in China but making no mention of the company's allegations that human rights activists' e-mail accounts had been hacked.

In a rare corporate rebuke of Asia's economic superpower, Google Inc. on Tuesday said it might leave China and the country's 350 million Internet users after it was the victim of a series of cyber attacks that originated from that nation. According to Google, a "highly sophisticated" December attack on its main corporate computers resulted in "the theft of intellectual property." The company said it believed that a key goal of the attackers was to access the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, raising the possibility that China's government not only may have hacked in to Google but also may have been using the company's network to conduct political espionage.

The lure of e-commerce and the need for reliable security in online transactions have forced large corporations and government agencies to dramatically step up their response to computer crime, according to a report to be released today by the FBI and the private Computer Security Institute in San Francisco.

It took federal law enforcement officials all of eight days to arrest Gary Dale Hoke, the PairGain Technologies employee who in April put up a bogus Internet announcement that the Tustin-based developer of telecommunications technology was being acquired by an Israeli outfit for $1.35 billion. The speed and efficiency of Hoke's apprehension amounted to blinding speed in the world of securities fraud, where cases can take years to investigate and prosecute.

Is it a "Warmist Conspiracy," or a case of an e-mail being "taken completely out of context"? Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month. Conservative bloggers have seized on a series of e-mails between leading climate scientists, which were obtained by computer hackers and posted online last week, as evidence of a scientific conspiracy to push claims about human-caused global warming.

A computer hacker accused of masterminding one of the largest cases of identity theft in U.S. history agreed to plead guilty and serve up to 25 years in federal prison for his crimes. Albert Gonzalez of Miami was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in federal court. Court documents indicate that Gonzalez, 28, agreed to plead guilty to 19 counts. Gonzalez is accused of swiping the credit and debit card numbers of more than 170 million accounts; officials said he was the ringleader of a group that targeted companies such as T.J. Maxx, Barnes and Noble and OfficeMax.