Blind teenager hacker jailed

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 30 Jun 2009 at 11:40

A blind teenager has been sentenced to 11 years in jail for hacking telephone networks and faking emergency calls.

Boston-based Matthew Weigman, who was also known as "little hacker", made over 60 prank emergency calls. He broke into the phone network to route the calls so as to appear as though they came from other lines.

The severity of Weigman's sentence is partly due to the fact that he was part of a group that drove to the house of a Verizon investigator collecting evidence against the hacker.

The aim of the trip, according to the Department of Justice, was to "intimidate and frighten him". Because of this, witness intimidation charges were added to computer intrusion.

Weigman had been using a number of techniques to hack into the systems, including conning phone company employees into handing out data, and war-dialing, which involves calling thousands of phone numbers in an attempt to find phone company systems.

He was sentenced to 135 months at the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Weigman had been actively hacking phone systems since he was 15, and spoke to Wired last year about how he began learning the necessary skills.

"I've been interested in phones since I've been about 8. I talked to technicians when they came down here to do things on my phone," he said.