11-month detention, no Internet, awaits Paris' T-Mobile hacker

Paris Hilton's 17-year-old adversary, a Massachusetts-resident juvenile who gained access into her US T-Mobile account, found little support in the Boston District Court and was served a 11 month sentence in a juvenile facility.

The unnamed juvenile whose identity is protected by law, pleaded guilty last week to nine counts of juvenile delinquency on charges ranging from hacking into internet and phone accounts to thieving private information and unauthorized publishing them on the web, besides threatening high schools with bomb threats.

The teen who managed to hack his way, accessed information stored by Paris Hilton on her Sidekick mobile accessory, that allowed her to make calls, web-surf, capture images or even message or email contacts. Though prosecutors would not confirm this, the boy is believed to have retrieved the private numbers of Paris' celebrity contacts stored in her mobile and posted them online, resulting in them receiving unwarranted calls. It was in a Washington Post story that Paris Hilton was linked as a victim to the Massachusetts boy.

According to a court statement, the boy committed the crimes over a 15-month period starting March 2004, leaving victims to claim about $1 million in damages. A representative of T-Mobile in USA said that one of the boy's hacking crimes involved gaining entry into T-Mobile's US systems in January this year. The shortly-to-turn-adult juvenile will follow his 11-month detention with two years of supervised freedom and will have to refrain from the urge of owning or using PCs, cell phones or any other Internet accessing device.

While investigators are looking at the possibility of accomplices, it is understood that the teenager's unauthorized web-publications included racy images and private numbers of Paris' friends circle including top pop artists, actors, tennis players etc. The T-Mobile representative also confirmed that he had created free telephone accounts for himself and his friends using his unauthorized access to the company's systems. In August 2004, the juvenile accessed America Online's internal network and installed a rogue program to gather proprietary information from an employee's computer. In January this year he went on to hack a data broker, LexisNexis' systems which believably maintains a personal information database of over 300,000 Americans.

Attorney Michael Sullivan while saying, "Computer hacking is not fun and games”, suggested that would-be hackers be “put on notice that such criminal activity will not be tolerated". T-Mobile's Peter Dobrow, feeling pleased that justice had been served and said, “We dedicated significant resources to help bring this criminal to justice". This is definitely a crime that his company would not forget easily as it would be bad for its reputation especially on high value accounts like that of Paris Hilton. Meanwhile, the hotel heiress and star of Fox TV's reality show “The Simple Life”, stayed away from comments supposedly “traveling” where her T- Mobile could not reached.

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