Dutch Hackers

[Boaz Ben-Zvi]

 fidelio at geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Rob J. Nauta) writes:
|> 
|> Today I read in the local paper that sunday's New York Times contained
|> an article about Dutch Hackers. Since I live in Holland, and the NYT
|> costs $12 here, and many other large newspapers are not on sale here,
|> could some kind soul please collect all articles about this subject, and
|> mail them to me ? I'd be eternally grateful !

Without permission, from Sunday's NYT :

   COMPUTER INTRUDERS TAPPING U.S. SYSTEMS    ( by  JOHN MARKOFF )

  Beyond the reach of American law, a group of Dutch computer intruders have
been openly defying United States military, space and intelligence authorities
for almost six months.

  Recently they broke into a U.S. military computer while being filmed by a
crew from Dutch television station.

  The intruders, working over local telephone lines that enable them to tap
American computer networks at almost no cost, have not done serious damage,
federal investigators say.

  And they have not penetrated the most secure government computer systems.
But they have entered a wide range of computers, including those at the
Kennedy Space Center, the Pentagon's Pacific Fleet Command, the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University via an international
computer network known as the Internet.

  While the information on these systems is not classified, the computers
store a great variety of material, including routine memorandums, unpublished
reports and data from experiments. Federal officials said the group had
tampered with some information stored on systems they have illegally entered.

  U.S. government officials said that they had been tracking the interlopers,
but that no arrests had been made because there are no legal restrictions in
the Netherlands barring unauthorized computer access.

  A reporter's efforts to reach Dutch government officials for comment have
been unsuccessful.

  ``This has been a terrible problem,'' said Gail Thackeray, a former Arizona
assistant attorney general who has prosecuted computer crimes. ``Until
recently there have been few countries that have computer crime laws. These
countries are acting as hacker havens.''

  She said that just as offshore banks in certain countries have traditionally
protected financial privacy, today some countries protect intellectual
property violations.

  American law-enforcement officials said they believed there were three or
four members of the Dutch group, but would not release any names. A Dutch
television news report in February showed a member of the group at the
University of Utrecht reading information off a computer screen showing what
he said was missile test information taken electronically from a U.S. military
computer. His back was to the camera, and he was not named.

  Military and intelligence agencies physically separate classified computer
networks from those used by businesses and researchers to protect the data
from electronic forays. When classified information is transmitted over
unprotected computer networks or telephone lines it must be specially coded.

  Because there are no computer crime laws in the Netherlands, American
investigators said members of the Dutch group boasted that they could enter
computers via international data networks with impunity.

  But some of the intruders have been identified, and a federal official, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there were numerous other criminal
offenses for which the they could be prosecuted in both the United States and
the Netherlands. One possible charge might be telephone fraud.

  But legal experts said that because there are no prohibitions against
unauthorized computer entry in the Netherlands successfully prosecuting the
group may still prove impossible.

  The case is significant, legal experts said, because while the United States
and many European countries have strict laws barring illegal access to
computers, there are many nations that have no computer crime laws.

  There is a proposed law before parliament in the Netherlands that would make
unauthorized computer access a crime. Also, a governmental committee of the
European Community is now working to standardize computer crime laws in
Europe.

  Because computer networks are accessible from anywhere in the world via a
telephone call they are potentially vulnerable to those who cannot easily be
prosecuted or convicted of a crime.

  In the Netherlands case, the group was detected last year after an unusually
skilled U.S. government computer researcher at a national laboratory tracked
the group's every move using advanced computer security techniques. He
notified U.S. authorities of the break-ins.

  The researcher has been able to make computer records of the intruders'
keystrokes as they have electronically prowled through U.S. military, NASA,
university and dozens of other computers. It has then been possible to play
this information back and gain an exact picture of the computer screen as it
appeared to the intruders in the Netherlands.

  From 1986 to 1988 Clifford Stoll, an astronomer at Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratories traced a similar group of West Germans, who were illegally
entering U.S. computers and selling computer data and software to a Soviet
intelligence officer.

  Stoll was able to persuade law enforcement officials to locate the group in
West Germany and three arrests were made. A German court eventually convicted
them, but gave them suspended sentences.

  One computer expert who has watched the electronic recordings made of the
activities of the Dutch group said they do not demonstrate any particularly
unusual computer skills, but instead appear to have access to a compendium of
documents that contain recipes for breaking computer security on many U.S.
systems.

  These documents have been widely circulated on underground computer systems.