Intellectual Property Law

Swede Indicted for NASA, Cisco Hacks

By David Kravets

A Swedish man convicted in 2007 of hacking into three of his country’s university computers as a teen-ager was indicted Monday in California on allegations of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division — and seizing computer code that controls internet traffic.

Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as “Stakkato,” was also being eyed for allegedly hacking into the U.S. government’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and U.S. military networks. He was likely unmasked by U.S. authorities using a sophisticated, FBI-produced spyware program as part of Major Case 216 (.pdf).

In 2007, when he was 19, Petterrson was convicted of invading the networks of three Swedish universities and ordered to pay $25,000 in damages. U.S. officials had interviewed the suspect in Sweden, who was 16 at the time of the intrusions.

But the hacker, charged with five hacking counts, (.pdf) is unlikely to ever go to trial in the United States, unless he is nabbed outside of Sweden. Sweden does not extradite its own citizens. But the Swedish authorities could prosecute Pettersson at home if the United States successfully lobbies Sweden to do so.

After the 2004 breach of Cisco, the proprietary source code for Cisco’s IOS operating system was discovered on a Russian website -? potentially providing a roadmap for the sophisticated intruders to compromise some routers.

Photo: altemark

See Also:

• Feds Charge ‘Analyzer’ Hacker With Stealing $10 Million
• Palin Hacker Denies Felony Charge and ‘Hacker’ Label

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 05, 2009 (boomark / email).