Nahshon Even-Chaim - Even-Chaim's Targets

Even-Chaim's Targets

Even-Chaim pleaded guilty to 15 charges, which involved his intrusion into computers at:

• Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne, where he gained unauthorised access to and copied Zardoz, a computer industry bulletin identifying security weaknesses in Unix operating systems;
• University of California, Berkeley (inserting data);
• NASA in Virginia (accessing data, inserting data, altering data, obstructing the lawful use of the NASA computer);
• Execucom, a software and technology company in Austin, Texas (altering data, erasing data);
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California (altering data, interfering with a computer);
• University of Wisconsin–Madison (inserting data);
• Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana (inserting data).

After allegedly compromising computers used by computer security experts Eugene Spafford, Clifford Stoll, and Russell L. Brand (at LLNL), Even-Chaim called New York Times journalist John Markoff in response to an article in which Markoff had attributed a recent spate of computer break-ins to a worm. Even-Chaim boasted to Markoff that the break-ins had been the work of himself and his associates, and ridiculed the computer security community, claiming: "It used to be the security guys chasing the hackers. Now, it's the hackers chasing the security guys." Markoff published the claims in a follow-up article in March 1990.