Security guard pleads guilty to hacking his employer

IDG News Service - A former security guard has pleaded guilty to charges that he broke into his employer's computers while working the night shift at a Dallas hospital.

Jesse William McGraw pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of transmitting malicious code, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement.

The 25-year-old hacker wasn't hard to catch; he posted videos of his misadventures to YouTube. In one video, he pretends to break into the hospital, saying he's "infiltrated a very large corporate office," and proceeds to install botnet code on a nurse's station computer. The theme music to the movie "Mission:Impossible" plays in the background as he tells viewers, "You're on a mission with me: infiltration."

Online he was known as Ghost Exodus, a member of a hacking group known as the Electronik Tribulation Army. He installed the botnet code in order to help take down the Web site of a rival hacker group, the DoJ said.

He was arrested just days before his planned July 4, 2009, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which he had nicknamed "Devil's Day."

Prosecutors say he broke into more than 14 computers, including a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) computer, at the North Central Medical Plaza, the Dallas surgical center where he worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift.

The hacker had been employed by a local security firm called United Protection Services.

He has been in custody since his June 2009 arrest and now faces up to 10 years in prison on each of the two counts. He is set to be sentenced on Sept. 16.