17 year old Mike Nieves from New York has a nice resume. AOL LLC alleged that the teenager broke into their databases with confidential information about customers and from December 24, 2006 until April 7, 2007 he continued infecting their servers with a malicious application that transfered data onto his computer.

AOL filed a complaint at the Criminal Court of the City of New York and the DA’s office alleged that Mike Nieves faces four felony charges and one misdemeanor charge after he was caught with computer trespassing, criminal possession of computer material and computer tampering. The teenager is under investigation for accessing systems that contained confidential data like customer billing records, credit card information or addresses, for infecting a call center in New Delhi, India, for an attempt to break-in a AOL customer support center, for a phishing attack against AOL staff that gave him access to over 60 accounts of employees and subcontractors and for logging in without permission into 49 AIM instant message customer service accounts.

The cost for AOL was $500,000 so far and they are still not sure if sensitive data was compromised or not, or if it was stolen. These are information that should be presented later in Court. Mark Rasch, managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Inc., commented a little on the case and I find what he said, really interesting : “AOL has had pretty good security over the years.” Do you guys think that for a very big company pretty good security is enough? Hell no! They should have had hardcore good security.

The case is still early and they are not sure if Mike Nieves tried to break into AOL computers to steal data for material gains or not. He said “I accessed their internal accounts and their network and used it to try to get my accounts back”. There is also the rumor that Mike Nieves is part of a bigger group of hackers focused on big companies only which I believe more. - ALEX ION

[Source : InfoWorld]

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