Robert Moore, the 23-year old mastermind behind a duo of VoIP hackers that stole over 10 million of call minutes from at least 15 different internet telephony service providers has been sentenced to two years in a federal prison and a $150 000 fine. His partner in crime, 25-year old Edwin Pena who sold the stolen minutes to other carriers, jumped bail and has supposedly fled the country.

Apparently Moore used his 12 home computers and a relatively simple technology known as a brute force attack, where software will try and randomly guess passwords to gain access to, in this case, H.323 gateways. This often leads to easy system access with default passwords such as ‘admin’ or ‘cisco’.

The whole scam is said to have generated more than $1 million in profits for the duo, but Moore claims to have received no more than $20 000 from Pena. Unfortunately, a website set up to raise money for the legal defense of Moore only generated a little over $600.

You can read the full story here

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 11:03 CEST and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.