FBI reportedly nabs suspected teen-age Pentagon hacker Copyright © 1998 Nando.net Copyright © 1998 Reuters News Service SAN FRANCISCO (March 1, 1998 12:36 p.m. EST http://www.nando.net) - FBI agents have caught a teen-age boy suspected of launching a massive computer "hack" attack on U.S. military computers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday. FBI agents armed with sealed warrants searched the homes of two teen-agers Wednesday in the small town of Cloverdale, about 75 miles north of San Francisco, and caught one boy in the act of hacking into a non-classified Pentagon computer, the Chronicle said. The boy, aged 15 or 16, was not arrested because of his age and the ongoing nature of the investigation. The Chronicle said that agents went through the boy's home and that of another Cloverdale High School student suspected of participating in the electronic break-ins and seized computers, software and printers. A spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco was unavailable for comment Friday. The Chronicle said that federal sources declined to comment on possible links between the Cloverdale searches and a series of cyber-attacks on 11 U.S. military computers this month. The electronic break-ins to military computers sparked alarm in the Pentagon, although no classified networks were penetrated. Officials said that even if it were just a game, it was a "wake-up call" on the vulnerability of government and corporate computers. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre told reporters Wednesday that "it was the most organized and systematic attack the Pentagon has seen to date." The Chronicle said the suspected Cloverdale hackers apparently used a local Internet service, Netdex Internet Services, as a base, and left a clear "electronic path" pointing to a series of federal and military computer systems. It quoted Netdex owner Bill Zane as saying the company notified law enforcement agencies and the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh as soon as it noticed the hacker activity. "We actually had online battles with the hackers," Zane told the Chronicle. "We were watching them and they knew we were watching them. They were trying to re-install their software files as fast as we could destroy them." Zane said the hackers apparently leapfrogged from Netdex into other systems, including the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, national laboratories, numerous military sites, and two sites in Mexico. He also said there were "clear indications" that the hackers were communicating with other hackers and getting software tools from others. "The sheer volume of it differentiates it from some hobbyist amateur," Zane was quoted as saying. "These people were doing it in a methodical, organized way." "I would be very surprised if this were just kids," Zane said. "It's not beyond conception that there's a group of people, and kids are being used by someone else."