Swedish investigators are probing a hacker U.S. authorities accuse of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA's Ames Research Center and NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division, the authorities said Monday.
Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as "Stakkato," allegedly seized computer code that controls internet traffic. After the 2004 breach of Cisco, the proprietary source code for Cisco’s IOS operating system was discovered on a Russian website.
Pettersson was indicted in the United States in May on five hacking counts, (.pdf) but could not be brought from Sweden to the United States for trial. Sweden does not extradite its own citizens, but said it was examining whether to prosecute him in Sweden after U.S. authorities in San Francisco initiated that request.
"The intrusions to Cisco Company and NASA are regarded as computer intrusion according to Swedish law," (.pdf) Swedish prosecutor Chatrine Rudstrom told federal prosecutors in San Francisco, according to documents released Monday.
Still, Rudstrom told San Francisco federal authorities that Sweden was not guaranteeing it would charge the 21-year-old suspect.
Petterrson was convicted in 2007 of invading the networks of three Swedish universities and ordered to pay $25,000 in damages. He was 16 at the time of the intrusions.
Photo: altemark
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