I’m a big fan of the T-Mobile Sidekick, nee “Danger Hiptop”. I carry mine with me wherever I go (well, almost). Once thought of as the poor man’s Blackberry, the Sidekick has really come into its own, offering all if not more of the functionality of the Blackberry, for half the price, and at half the size.
Plus, it’s got that uber-cool flip-up screen which brings to mind a 007 gadget.
So it was with not a little dismay that I learned that T-Mobile’s users’ accounts, and in particular Sidekick accounts, had been hacked and compromised.
And it wasn’t just a one-time deal. The hacker, one Nicholas Jacobsen, had illegal access to the servers and accounts for somewhere between seven months and a year, depending on which account you read. Nicholson had access to user names, social security numbers, and, oh gosh, photographs of celebrities taken by other celebrities using their Sidekicks (including, by one account, photos of Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Nicole Richie, and Paris Hilton).
But the most interesting twist to this story is that there was, in fact, a Secret Service agent hot on the trail of Jacobsen. This Secret Service agent – let’s call him Peter Cavicchia because, hey, that’s his name – is himself a hip techie kinda guy. An early adopter of technology kinda guy. The kind of guy who would carry..wait for it…
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..a T-Mobile Sidekick (you see where this is going, don’t you?)
Yep, in a deranged twist of irony, or fate, or both, Jacobsen had actually hacked in to Cavicchia’s T-Mobile Sidekick account.
And why yes, he did access sensitive information from Cavicchia’s Sidekick account, including, according to court documents, “highly sensitive information pertaining to ongoing … criminal cases”.
That’s what we know to date. The accounts all leave several questions unanswered, such as why did Jacobsen have access for such an incredibly long time?
And why was Cavicchia transmitting and storing sensitive national documents on such an inherently unsecure system which he knew was being hacked because he was investigating the hacker?
But above all, where are those pictures posted?
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