NASA hacker jailed for cyber-crime spree

A member of the £conflict hacking group was sentenced to four months of home confinement and ordered to pay $4,400 in compensation for hosting a hack-chatroom on a NASA computer.

Raymond Torricelli from New York was punished after admitting to hacking into two computers held at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1998 from his home PC.

Torricelli installed a program that allowed him to host a chatroom for other members of his hacking group on one computer, normally used to perform satellite design and mission analysis for future space adventures.

A second computer, the communications ground system's email and internal server, was infiltrated by a sniffer program to intercept passwords and user names from San Jose State University and Georgia Southern University as messages moved across the hosted networks.

The defendant's home computer provided the evidence of his activities as it contained over 76,000 stolen passwords, many of which had been decrypted using a program called John-the-Ripper.

Torricelli said he also stole credit card numbers from the net and made purchases with them and at his hearing, said he was paid 18 cents every time he got one of the chatroom users to go to a particular porn site.

silicon.com was unable to ascertain whether Torricelli's PC will be sharing his home confinement with him.