Montreal, Canada – Notorious Israeli Hacker Arrested

Montreal, Canada – Canadian authorities have announced the arrest of a 29-year-old Israeli named Ehud Tenenbaum whom they believe is the notorious hacker known as “The Analyzer” who, as a teenager in 1998, hacked into unclassified computer systems belonging to NASA, the Pentagon, the Israeli parliament and others.

Tenenbaum and three Canadians were arrested in Montreal for allegedly hacking the computer system of a Calgary-based financial services company and inflating the value on several pre-paid debit card accounts before withdrawing about CDN $1.8 million (about U.S. $1.7 million) from ATMs in Canada and other countries. The arrests followed a months-long investigation by Canadian police and the U.S. Secret Service.

Tenenbaum faces six counts of fraudulent use of credit card data and one count of fraud over $5,000. He remains in custody in Calgary without bail, though the three other suspects — Priscilla Mastrangelo, 30, Jean Francois Ralph, 28, and Sypros Xenoulis, 33 — have been released on bond, according to a Canadian media report.

An Israeli media outlet contacted Tenenbaum’s mother, but she didn’t know if it was her son who had been arrested. She told the reporter that her son spends time in France and Canada and that she tried to contact him after news of the arrest went public, but she was unable to reach him.

Tenenbaum was 19 when he was arrested in 1998 along with several other Israelis and two California teens in one of the first high-profile hacker cases that made international news. Tenenbaum and his fellow Israeli hackers referred to themselves at the time as the Israeli Internet Underground or the “Enforcers.” According to Israeli court documents, their activities began when one of the Israelis asked Tenenbaum to help him hack into the computer system of the Sde Boker Seminary — a college in Israel’s Negev Desert — in order to read the e-mail correspondence of a female.

Tenenbaum then used sniffer and Trojan horse programs to break into computer systems belonging to two Israeli ISPs and obtain user names and passwords of customers. He used the hi-jacked customer accounts to breach other computer systems belonging to all of the universities in Israel, the web sites for the Israeli parliament and Israel’s president as well as a system belonging to Hamas, a militant Palestinian organization. An attempt to breach the computer system of the Israel Defense Forces failed.

Tenenbaum, who referred to the California teens as his pupils, taught his accomplices how to hack into U.S. systems and gave them sniffer and Trojan programs to assist them. Although Tenenbaum’s attacks were unsophisticated — they simply exploited a long-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system that had been left unpatched — he and his cohorts were nonetheless able to breach systems belonging to the Department of Defense, the Air Force and Navy, NASA, MIT, and several U.S. Ivy League universities.

The attacks on the U.S. military systems came at a time of high alert in the Middle East when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was defying U.N. weapons inspections. U.S. authorities were so unsettled by the breach of military computers — which they called “the most organized and systematic attack” that had occurred to date — that a joint investigation was launched by several government and military agencies, dubbed Operation Solar Sunrise, to track down the source of the threats.

Tenenbaum was caught after the two California teens were arrested.

Israel’s then-prime minister Bibi Netanyahu called Tenenbaum “damn good” after learning of his deeds. But added that he was also “very dangerous, too.” The hacker was eventually sentenced in 2001 to six months of community service in Israel. By then, he was working as a computer security consultant.