Teen Pleads Guilty to Hacking Paris Hilton's Phone

An adult member of the hacker group acknowledged in phone conversations with a washingtonpost.com reporter that he collaborated with the teen in sending hundreds of e-mails with an explicit image and a message urging recipients to open an attached file to view additional pornographic images of children. According to both hackers, a police officer in Florida was among those who opened the e-mail attachment, which harbored a virus-like program that allowed the hackers to record anything a victim typed on his or her computer keyboard. Not long after his computer was infected with the keystroke-capturing program, the officer logged on to his police department's account at Accurint, a LexisNexis service provided by Florida-based subsidiary Seisint Inc., which sells access to consumer data.

The teen said the group members then created a series of sub-accounts using the police department's name and billing information. Over the period of several days, the group looked up thousands of names in the database, including those of friends and celebrities.

Then in June, according to prosecutors, he called "a major telephone service provider because a phone that a friend had fraudulently activated had been shut off." (A washingtonpost.com reporter was invited to listen in on the call, which was made to Little Rock-based Alltel Corp.) When the company refused to provide the requested access, the teen threatened to cripple its Web site with a "distributed denial of service" attack, in which attackers use the Internet bandwidth of hundreds or thousands of remote-controlled computers to overwhelm a site with so much traffic that it can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.

Roughly 10 minutes later the teen and others "initiated a denial of service attack that succeeded in shutting down a significant portion of the telephone service provider's web operations," according to the prosecutors.

The Justice Department said the investigation of the teen's associates is continuing, but it remains unclear how many of those individuals will be prosecuted. In May, Secret Service and FBI officials served search warrants on at least nine people thought to be connected to the hacking ring of which the teen was a member, known as the "Defonic Team Screen Name Club" or "DFNCTSC" for short.

The teen is likely to be required as a condition of his plea agreement to cooperate with the government in their ongoing investigation and provide information not only about how the attacks were carried out, but who else was involved and what their roles were, said Mark D. Rasch, senior vice president at McLean, Va.-based online security firm Solutionary Inc. and a former federal prosecutor for computer crimes.

According to interviews with at least two other former members of the group, investigators now are focusing on the individual who helped the teen gain access to LexisNexis.

"They came and took my laptop and asked a whole bunch of questions about him," a former group member known online as "DJint" said. "They told me they're looking to go after him for access-device fraud and possession of child pornography."

Still, Rasch said, it could be some time before the government wraps up its investigation into these attacks.

"Investigations of computer crimes are particularly difficult because they always involve many different types of evidence from numerous locations, and they require cooperation from many different organizations," Rasch said. "It's hard work."