Forwarded From: Nelson Murilo <nelsonat_private> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/wr/story.html?s=v/nm/19980821/wr/hacker-sweden_1.html Friday August 21 3:41 PM EDT Swedish hacker with a cause steals passwords By James Glave SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - An 18-year-old Swedish computer cracker has stolen and circulated the passwords for potentially thousands of dialup Internet access accounts to call attention to a grassroots campaign for flat-rate service. The teenager went public with the passwords to draw attention to the hourly access fees charged by Telia, Sweden's largest phone company and the owner of a popular Internet service provider. However, he doubted that his actions would have much of an effect. ``I don't think they will give us flat rate anyway,'' he said in a telephone interview with Wired News on Thursday. ''It's just that kind of company. They are really, really evil.'' Supporters posted the file to Web sites on Wednesday night, together with messages such as ``Flat Rate to the People!'' The cracker said that Internet users in Sweden had been lobbying unsuccessfully for flat-rate access for years. ``They don't even look at us,'' said the teen, who lives in the southern Sweden city of Gothenburg and declined to give his name. A spokesman for Telia Internet, the telco's Net access subsidiary, confirmed the theft. ``A password file has been stolen,'' said Olle M. Waktel, business manager of Telia Internet. ``It contains 3,000 passwords, but a larger part of them are obsolete, only a small amount are accurate and can be used.'' Waktel said the company has 197,000 subscribers. ``It really is a fraction of our entire customer base,'' he said, but declined to reveal how many of the stolen passwords were current. The hacker claimed that about 25 percent of them were active. The cracker said he stole the file from Telia in June, using a Unix exploit known as the ``qpopper'' -- essentially, computer code that takes advantage of a security bug -- that he ran against the company's servers. He said the attack took four or five hours, and Telia fixed the hole shortly thereafter. Telia Internet is popular in Sweden because the parent monopoly phone company offers toll-free dialup lines instead of the usual per-minute phone usage fees. The toll-free number eliminates standard per-minute phone tolls, while all ISPs charge by the minute. ``Many of my friends get $370 phone bills,'' said Georgios Rizell, a Swedish high school student, in a separate Internet relay chat interview about the cracker. ``We have among the lowest rates in the world, so I don't take their protests too seriously,'' said Waktel. ``We have pinpointed evidence of who we suspect is the perpetrator, and we plan to file charges.'' The cracker said that computer crimes are prosecuted in Sweden as industrial espionage and carry sentences of several years. ``Sometimes I get concerned,'' said the teenager, who said he had been using computers since the age of four and was a self-taught cracker. ``Life sucks anyway, nothing has changed.'' He said he was afraid of being caught, but details in news reports about the location of the compromised servers caused him to suspect that authorities had the wrong person in mind. ``I wasn't anywhere near that box,'' he said. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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