Film buffs, computer nerds, and Matthew Broderick fetishists alike will recall with fondness the 1983 drama ‘War Games’, where a very young Broderick hacks into the NORAD computer system and nearly initiates a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. Ah, the good old days of telephone modems, the Cold War, and Ally Sheedy. Well, while searching through Google for information on a rather unrelated subject, I came across the following headine, and just had to read further:
British Computer Genius Aged 16 Put Pentagon In A Panic As He Hacked Into Weapons Secrets
The story is from a few years back, but it nonetheless amusing. Apparently, Richard Pryce, a 16 year old British schoolboy, caused a bit of a raucous at the Pentagon when he hacked into America’s top-secret defense computers using his £750 home computer.
Defense chiefs feared a master-spy had infiltrated intelligence files and stolen some of the country’s most-closely guarded weapons secrets. In fact, members of the senate were told he had caused more harm than the KGB. It took investigators 13 months to track the source of the leak to England. Eventually Scotland Yard officers, tipped off by the CIA station chief at the US embassy, burst into a suburban house in Colindale, North London. Detectives, who were shocked to discover Pryce was just 16, found him at his keyboard on the 3rd floor of the house. Realizing that they had come to arrest him, Pryce curled up on the floor and cried. Not very James Bond of him, but hey, he was just a kid.
Pryce plead guilty and was fined £1,200 and ordered to pay £250 costs. Stipendiary magistrate Ronald Bartle, who described the case as “extra ordinary”, also ordered his computer equipment to be confiscated. Geoffery Robertson QC, defending, had earlier told the court that Pryce had been motivated by curiosity and not by malice or financial gain. He said Pryce had exploited vulnerabilities of computer systems that were widely known, and he stressed that he had not altered or erased any data. Simon Dawson, prosecuting, said when Pentagon officials discovered someone was tapping into the weapons and aircraft research H Q at Griffith Air Base, New York, they suspected foreign governments were desperate to get their hands on blueprints for the latest military hardware. They were probably afraid of someone getting possession of their much coveted ‘IT Security Systems & Protocols’ documents.
(This article post-dated, as I am at Burning Man!)
Share this
