Monday, March 17, 2003

U. of Texas Student Is Charged in Massive Theft of Social Security Numbers By VINCENT KIERNAN Federal prosecutors on Friday charged a student at the University of Texas at Austin with committing a massive theft of names and Social Security numbers from a database there in late February and early March. Christopher Andrew Phillips, 20, was charged with intentionally gaining access to a computer without authorization and with using another person's Social Security number to commit an unlawful activity. Mr. Phillips turned himself in to the Secret Service in Austin on Friday, after a U.S. Secret Service agent filed a criminal complaint naming the student in the incidents and alleging that he had confessed to the thefts. A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas released Mr. Phillips without bail. He faces up to eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. The incident, in which 52,500 names and Social Security numbers were obtained, is one of the largest ever known to have affected a campus network. Scam artists can use another person's name and Social Security number to fraudulently obtain credit cards and execute other financial transactions. UT-Austin officials announced earlier this month that, on several occasions, attacking computers ran a computer program that cross-checked about three million possible Social Security numbers against those listed in a database that the university used to track training classes for its employees. The program entered Social Security numbers from its list one at a time into the Texas database, which returned information whenever a valid number was submitted. The criminal complaint disclosed that campus officials first became aware of the hacking on the evening of March 2, when a routine check found that the database had received a total of more than 600,000 inquiries in the preceding two days, compared with the typical rate of 3,000 inquiries per day. The officials examined database logs and found that the 600,000 requests came from a single Internet address, according to the complaint. The Secret Service later determined that the address was assigned to a computer in the Houston home of Mr. Phillips's parents, according to the complaint. The complaint states that campus officials estimated that the database inquiries from that Internet address were being made at the rate of 10 to 20 per second, so fast that a computer program rather than a human typist had to be making the inquiries. UT-Austin officials then dug deeper into the database's logs and found that a large number of inquiries had been made to the database from February 26 through February 28, according to the complaint. The log files indicated that those requests were made from another Internet address -- one assigned to a computer in Mr. Phillips's apartment in Austin, according to the complaint. On March 5, the complaint says, Secret Service agents seized Mr. Phillips's computer and found that it included a file containing "thousands" of Social Security numbers and associated names, as well as a program to download information from the UT-Austin database. The complaint also says that Mr. Phillips admitted to Secret Service agents that he had used a program to download "voluminous" Social Security numbers and names from both the Houston and Austin residences. Mr. Phillips also told the agents that he had not distributed the numbers and had not used them "to anyone's detriment," according to the complaint. Neither Mr. Phillips nor his lawyer, Allan L. Williams, could immediately be reached for comment. But Mr. Williams told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, "His position is that he's cooperating with the government in every way he can." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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