McKinnon, a 42-year-old, unemployed systems administrator and self-confessed hacker is looking for ways to avoid extradition to and trial in the US on charges of hacking into various military databases - probably because he could receive up to a 60-year sentence under American legislation.The article can be found here in full, courtesy of Computer Weekly, but this was the part that most interested me:"It was child's play to get into US military systems, McKinnon said. Many were using blank or default passwords to access their servers' Netbios operating system. This allowed the former systems administrator to gain administrator privileges easily. Once in he could search for files, see who else was on the network, and even reset passwords and user privileges.
He admitted writing Perl scripts to harvest passwords, and to using password crackers to get into more protected systems. Once he was inside a network, especially a military network, McKinnon found that other computer systems considered him a trusted user. This was how he was able to get into the Pentagon's network. "It was really by accident," he said.
McKinnon said he was detected after he he got lazy, leaving messages on federal systems."
McKinnon had apparently been looking for government cover-ups involving extra-terrestrials and alien technology, which he sought to expose to the world media. Interestingly, he's been described by US officials as "the biggest and most dangerous military hacker of all time", as opposed to "an over-zealous IT specialist who wants to believe".
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