'Deceptive Duo' hacker charged by U.S. government

IDG News Service - A 20-year-old man from Pleasant Hill, Calif., suspected of being a hacker and calling himself "the Deceptive Duo" was expected to face a U.S. magistrate judge today on charges that he hacked into government computers and defaced government Web sites.
Robert Lyttle was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Northern California.
Lyttle has been charged with breaking into various government Web sites in April 2002, including sites for the Department of Defense's Defense Logistic Information Service (DLIS), the Office of Health Affairs (OHA) and NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC).
Lyttle was to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James in San Francisco today for his arraignment. The charges pending against him carry maximum combined penalties of up to 16 years in jail and fines totaling $600,000, as well as possible restitution.
Kyle Waldinger, assistant U.S. attorney in the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Unit, will serve as the chief prosecutor of the case.
In April 2002, the Deceptive Duo claimed to be a hacking group working to expose the lack of security within the U.S. government's networks as well as other private-sector computer systems. The group said it had hacked into classified and nonclassified systems.
The government has charged Lyttle with gaining unauthorized access to DLIS computers in Battle Creek, Mich., for the purpose of obtaining files that he later used to deface an OHA Web site hosted on computers in San Antonio. Furthermore, Lyttle is accused of hacking into the NASA ARC computer at Moffett Field, Calif., to obtain information that he then used to deface a Web site hosted on the computer. The U.S. attorney's office estimated that it cost the government more than $70,000 to correct the damage caused by Lyttle.
At the time of the hacking events, the "Deceptive Duo" said he had used a default password to log into sites using Microsoft Corp.'s SQL servers. He also breached systems by using the NetBIOS Brute Force attack method in which a hacker repeatedly guesses passwords to gain entry into a system using the NetBIOS protocol, the Deceptive Duo said.