[Infowarrior] - Israeli Hacker "The Analyzer" Suspected of Hacking Again

[Richard Forno]

Israeli Hacker Known as "The Analyzer" Suspected of Hacking Again
By Kim Zetter EmailSeptember 05, 2008 | 8:01:00 PMCategories: Crime,  
Hacks and Cracks

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/the-analyzer-su.html

Canadian authorities have announced the arrest of a 29-year-old  
Israeli named Ehud Tenenbaum whom they believe is the notorious hacker  
known as "The Analyzer" who, as a teenager in 1998, hacked into  
unclassified computer systems belonging to NASA, the Pentagon, the  
Israeli parliament and others.

Tenenbaum and three Canadians were arrested for allegedly hacking the  
computer system of a Calgary-based financial services company and  
inflating the value on several pre-paid debit card accounts before  
withdrawing about CDN $1.8 million (about U.S. $1.7 million) from ATMs  
in Canada and other countries. The arrests followed a months-long  
investigation by Canadian police and the U.S. Secret Service.

Tenenbaum faces six counts of fraudulent use of credit card data and  
one count of fraud over $5,000. He remains in custody in Calgary  
without bail, though the three other suspects -- Priscilla  
Mastrangelo, 30, Jean Francois Ralph, 28, and Sypros Xenoulis, 33 --  
have been released on bond, according to a Canadian media report.

An Israeli media outlet contacted Tenenbaum's mother, but she didn't  
know if it was her son who had been arrested. She told the reporter  
that her son spends time in France and Canada and that she tried to  
contact him after news of the arrest went public, but she was unable  
to reach him.

Tenenbaum was 19 when he was arrested in 1998 along with several other  
Israelis and two California teens in one of the first high-profile  
hacker cases that made international news. Tenenbaum and his fellow  
Israeli hackers referred to themselves at the time as the Israeli  
Internet Underground or the "Enforcers." According to Israeli court  
documents, their activities began when one of the Israelis asked  
Tenenbaum to help him hack into the computer system of the Sde Boker  
Seminary -- a college in Israel's Negev Desert -- in order to read the  
e-mail correspondence of a female.

Tenenbaum then used sniffer and Trojan horse programs to break into  
computer systems belonging to two Israeli ISPs and obtain user names  
and passwords of customers. He used the hi-jacked customer accounts to  
breach other computer systems belonging to all of the universities in  
Israel, the web sites for the Israeli parliament and Israel's  
president as well as a system belonging to Hamas, a militant  
Palestinian organization. An attempt to breach the computer system of  
the Israel Defense Forces failed.

Tenenbaum, who referred to the California teens as his pupils, taught  
his accomplices how to hack into U.S. systems and gave them sniffer  
and Trojan programs to assist them. Although Tenenbaum's attacks were  
unsophisticated -- they simply exploited a long-known vulnerability in  
the Solaris operating system that had been left unpatched -- he and  
his cohorts were nonetheless able to breach systems belonging to the  
Department of Defense, the Air Force and Navy, NASA, MIT, and several  
U.S. Ivy League universities.

The attacks on the U.S. military systems came at a time of high alert  
in the Middle East when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was defying  
U.N. weapons inspections. U.S. authorities were so unsettled by the  
breach of military computers -- which they called "the most organized  
and systematic attack" that had occurred to date -- that a joint  
investigation was launched by several government and military  
agencies, dubbed Operation Solar Sunrise, to track down the source of  
the threats.

Tenenbaum was caught after the two California teens were arrested.

Israel's then-prime minister Bibi Netanyahu called Tenenbaum "damn  
good" after learning of his deeds. But added that he was also "very  
dangerous, too." The hacker was eventually sentenced in 2001 to six  
months of community service in Israel. By then, he was working as a  
computer security consultant.