Juvenile pleads guilty to using trojan horse that captured more than 500 AOL user passwords

Incident Date: June 29 1998
Incident Location: New York NY USA

A juvenile, called "John Doe" in court papers due to his age, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court on June 29, 1998 to one count of unlawful interception of electronic communications. He admitted to using a Trojan horse program to steal more than 500 account passwords from American Online (AOL) customers. The boy sent the Trojan horse to AOL users as email attachments and convinced them to run the program. Once running, the Trojan horse would record the customers’ keystrokes, including when they typed in their passwords. The boy could then access the logged keystrokes and use the captured passwords to unlawfully use the customer accounts.


Story Sources

Title: Guilty Plea in Password Theft
Author:
Date: 6/29/1998
Publication: Reuters
Publication Location: New York NY USA
Publication URL: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,13338,00.html


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