As many of the Internet Patrol’s regular readers know, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was hacked, and the data was posted to the Internet, several months ago. And they also know that one Nicholas Lee Jacobsen pleaded guilty to the T-Mobile hacking which is assumed to have lead to Miss Hilton’s Sidekick account being hacked.
Now, however, a New Jersey teenager is claiming to have been part of a hacking group involved in the incident, and his evidence has been independently corroborated by several sources.
According to the unnamed teenager, the hacking group had free access to the T-Mobile servers for months prior to the Hilton hacking, and this is consistent with the facts as we know them to be, as Jacobsen had initially breached the T-Mobile network months before he was apprehended.
But what wasn’t known before is this: the entire thing was made possible by some good old-fashioned conning. In order for this hack to have happened, the group needed information which was available only to T-Mobile employees, and they got it by tricking a sales rep at a T-Mobile store in California into revealing the information. According to the teen’s account, the conversation went something like this:
Hacker: “This is (made up name) from T-Mobile headquarters in Washington. We heard you’ve been having problems with your customer account tools?”
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T-Mobile Employee: “No, we haven’t had any problems really, just a couple slowdowns. That’s about it.”
Hacker: “Yes, that’s what is described here in the report. We’re going to have to look into this for a quick second.”
T-Mobile Employee: “All right, what do you need?”
At which point the hacker was able to get from the T-Mobile employee both the web address of T-Mobile’s employee-only website, as well as that particular store’s username and password!
Oops.
Of hacking into Paris Hilton’s account specifically, the young hacker explains, “As soon as I went into her camera and saw nudes my head went JACKPOT. I was like, HOLY SHIT DUDE … SHE’S GOT NUDES. THIS SHIT’S GONNA HIT THE PRESS SO FUCKING QUICK.”
Of course, that wasn’t the only sh*t to hit something, as it quickly hit the fan with the release of Hilton’s data.
Now, granted, the hacking group had the experience to know where to look once they had gotten in to T-Mobile’s system, but what it really took was reliance on human fallibility – without the confidential information which the T-Mobile salesperson had unwittingly supplied to the hacking group, none of this could have happened.
And that is the lesson to be learned here – for the average user, the vast majority of bad Internet stuff can be avoided if the user themselves doesn’t give it up, and make their computer and data accessible to the badies.
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Ha! If we could only remove humans from the internet equation, this world would be a much safer place…don’t you think? We ARE our own worst enemies.