Reformed computer hacker Kevin Mitnick no longer holds the record for the longest individual prison term for computer crime. Brian Salcedo was sentenced January 11 to nine years in the federal can, beating Mitnick's five-and-a-half years plus.
Salcedo had pleaded guilty last August to conspiracy and other computer crime charges as one of three Michigan men believed to have hacked into the nationwide computer network of Lowe's, the retail hardware chain.
The threesome—including Paul Timmons and Adam Botbyl, both of whom await sentencing in the case—attempted to steal customer credit information, potentially costing Lowe's millions, which factored into the stiff term handed to Salcedo by U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg.
"I think the massive amount of potential loss that these defendants could have imposed was astounding," federal prosecutor Matthew Martens told reporters, "so that's what caused us to seek a substantial sentence against Mr. Salcedo."
Timmons was convicted of so-called "wardriving," or driving around with a special antenna looking for unprotected Wi-Fi hotspots. His sentencing date hasn't been set as of this writing, but Botbyl—who pleased guilty to conspiracy in the case and faces a recommendation of three years, five months behind bars—has a January 19 sentencing date.
Salcedo, Timmons, and Botbyl were accused to tapping into a Lowe's wireless network in Southfield, Michigan and using the tap to get into Lowe's central system in North Carolina, into which they implanted a program to snatch credit information. They failed to get what they sought, and were prosecuted in North Carolina because of their eventual target and because the FBI has a computer crime task force division there.
They weren't even close to being as successful as Mitnick, who is now a computer security consultant and writer. Mitnick's hacking cost several companies millions when he broke in, stole software and altered computer information—his high-profile victims included Motorola, Mokia, and Sun Microsystems—until a three-year federal manhunt for him ended with his 1995 arrest.
Mitnick's first book, The Art of Deception, was so successful in providing a from-the-source look into the computer hacker's mind that he was commission in late 2003 to write a second, with a working title of The Art of Intrusion, in which he planned to gather up first-person accounts from other reformed hackers.
He served most of his five years plus before he even went on trial, and he was also kept in solitary confinement for eight months. "The government said I could start a nuclear war if I had access to a telephone," he said of that experience.
