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From: NL1SMS@NL3NW.ZH.NLD.EU
To  : HACK@NLD

Cracker Fights for Flat Rates
by James Glave 

4:30pm  20.Aug.98.PDT

An 18-year-old Swedish computer cracker has stolen and circulated the
passwords for potentially thousands of dialup Internet access accounts to call
attention to a grassroots campaign for flat-rate service.

The teenager went public with the passwords to draw attention to the hourly
access fees charged by Telia, Sweden's largest phone company and the owner of
a popular Internet service provider. However, he doubted that his actions
would have much of an effect.

"I don't think they will give us flat rate anyway," he said in a telephone
interview with Wired News on Thursday. "It's just that kind of company. They
are really, really evil."

Supporters posted the file to Web sites on Wednesday night, together with
messages such as "Flat Rate to the People!" The cracker said that Internet
users in Sweden had been lobbying unsuccessfully for flat-rate access for
years.

"They don't even look at us," said the teen, who lives in the southern
Sweden city of Gothenburg and declined to give his name.

A spokesman for Telia Internet, the telco's Net access subsidiary, confirmed
the theft.

"A password file has been stolen," said Olle M. Waktel, business manager of
Telia Internet. "It contains 3,000 passwords, but a larger part of them are
obsolete, only a small amount are accurate and can be used."

Waktel said the company has 197,000 subscribers. "It really is a fraction of
our entire customer base," he said, but declined to reveal how many of the
stolen passwords were current. The hacker claimed that about 25 percent of
them were active.

The cracker said he stole the file from Telia in June, using a Unix exploit
known as the "qpopper" -- essentially, computer code that takes advantage of a
security bug -- that he ran against the company's servers. He said the attack
took four or five hours, and Telia fixed the hole shortly thereafter.

Telia Internet is popular in Sweden because the parent monopoly phone company
offers toll-free dialup lines instead of the usual per-minute phone usage
fees. The toll-free number eliminates standard per-minute phone tolls, while
all ISPs charge by the minute.

"Many of my friends get US$370 phone bills," said Georgios Rizell, a Swedish
high school student, in a separate Internet relay chat interview about the
cracker.

he lowest rates in the world, so I don't take [their protests]
too seriously," said Waktel. "We have pinpointed evidence of who we suspect is
the perpetrator, and we plan to file charges in the morning."

The cracker said that computer crimes are prosecuted in Sweden as industrial
espionage and carry sentences of several years.

"Sometimes I get concerned," said the teenager, who said he had been using
computers since the age of four and was a self-taught cracker. "Life sucks
anyway, nothing has changed."

He said he was afraid of being caught, but details in news reports about the
location of the compromised servers caused him to suspect that authorities had
the wrong person in mind. "I wasn't anywhere near that box," he said.

"I am a bit worried, but I don't know what I want," said the cracker. "We'll
see what happens tomorrow."

Check on other Web coverage of this story with NewsBot

[www.wired.com]