Christopher Phillips, a former student at the University of Texas at Austin who attempted one of the more brazen campus hacking stunts in recent memory, has been denied by an appeals court in an effort to get his sentence lessened.
In 2005 a federal judge sentenced Mr. Phillips to five years of probation, 500 hours of community service, and more than $170,000 in restitution payments after the former student admitted to hatching a rather aggressive identity-theft scheme. Mr. Phillips said he designed software that guessed students’ Social Security numbers and then used them to extract personal information, according to CNET News. “What’s a little odd,” writes CNET, “is that this apparently continued for some 14 months without Texas officials realizing what was going on.” —Brock Read
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