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Teen hacker charged with Nasa attacks

Intel hackers sm0ked crew claim cracker as one of their own

Update: A teenager from Michigan has been arrested and charged after allegedly breaking into computer systems owned by Nasa, and defacing the space agency's Web sites.

Associated Press reports the 15 year-old is believed by investigators to be affiliated with hacking group Electronic Souls, and has been questioned about offences carried out under the name of this group.

Investigators quizzed the youth about hacking into Nasa systems at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, twice in January. He is also alleged to have broken into systems at Sandia National Laboratories, a US Department of Energy facility in New Mexico.

The unnamed teenager has been charged with unauthorised access to computers, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison, and has been detained in a juvenile facility pending a March 28 pre-trial hearing.

In a separate case, another teenage Web page hacker received was sentenced to spend nine months behind bars last Friday after pleading guilty to defacing an ant-drugs Web site with pro-drug messages, and redirecting traffic from the site of RSA Security.

18 year-old Dennis Moran, whose hacker handle was Coolio, will reported spend his time chokey programming the jail's computers. He was also ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 to each of his victims. An archive of Coolio's work is available here. ®

Nasa attacks

Since we printed our original article member of the hacker group sm0ked crew have being touch to claim ownership of the youngster as one of their own. According the them, the teenager had a hacker handle of darkness or icefist and was a member of their group at the time their arrest. Copes of icefist's work can be seen here here and the Nasa defacement here. These defacements indicate icefist was also a member of the Sesame Street HaxOrz and affiliated to Electronic Souls.

Copies of a January defacement of Goddard Space Flight Centre, carried out by BrainStorm of Electronic Souls, are mirrored on defacement site Alldas.de and available here. An archive of BrainStorm's defacements is available here.

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