US court indicts Pakistani hacker
IANS
NEW YORK: A Pakistani hacker in the U.S. has been indicted by a federal jury on charges of hacking into the computer server of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Web site, SADA reports.
U.S. Attorney Thomas M. DiBiagio and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that a federal grand jury in Greenbelt has passed a four-count indictment against Misbah Khan.
The indictment charged Khan, from Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, with hacking into the AIPAC's computer server in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 1, 2000.
He replaced the AIPAC's Web page with a page boasting that they had been "hacked by Doctor Nuker, Founder Pakistan Hackerz Club, doctornuker@puckoff.com," the Maryland U.S. Attorney's office stated.
Lynne Hunt, FBI special agent in-charge, said "doctornuker was recently identified as Misbah Khan by the FBI computer crime squad with the assistance of the FBI legal office or legat at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad."
The unauthorised Web page contained statements attacking Israel and links to other anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian Web sites. In addition, Khan took confidential computer credit card account information belonging to AIPAC members and posted the account information on the unauthorised page and other sites.
The four-count indictment charged Khan with disrupting the transmission of a computer command, which intentionally caused damage to AIPAC's computer; intentionally accessing AIPAC's computer authorisation and obtaining information from that computer; defrauding 15 or more unauthorised "access devices" (credit card account numbers); and causing the use of unauthorised access devices to obtain things of value of more than $1000.
The two offences are punishable with five years in jail; the credit card offences are punishable with up to 10 years in jail; and all four counts carry fines of up to $250,000 and terms of supervised release of up to three years.
Khan is innocent until proven guilty, the office said. The AIPAC is a pro-Israel public affairs group established in 1950 with offices in Washington and 50,000 members in the U.S.
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