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Hack Attack on the South Pole Station
19:05 p.m. EDT Oct 23, 2003
1999, Romania had a total solar eclipse blackout over its Transylvanian castles. This year, Antarctica will have a full solar eclipse later this fall. So how does this connect? Well, it starts with an e-mail to the South Pole station, May 3, 2003:
"I've hacked into the server of your South Pole Research Station," it read. "Pay me off, or I will sell the station's data to another country." The email contained data found only on South Pole computer systems, demonstrating that it was not a hoax. The threat hinted that the South Pole network had been widely penetrated, potentially with harmful software that would cause harm if triggered by the hacker. FBI tracked the mail to a web cafe in Transylvania.
We were in Transylvania in 1999 to watch that eclipse. Two years later we skied to the South Pole. We carried wearable computers in a high tech setup. We made the world's first Bluetooth transmissions and the first live pics and dispatches from the trip. We even got to visit the SP comm room. We need money to run this website. But swear to God - it wasn't us!
Two Romanian citizens accused of hacking into the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station science research facility were finally arrested in a joint FBI/Romanian police operation last month. Now, wait a minute - wasn't there a high tech Romanian Everest expedition scheduled for Karakorum this summer. And then - uh uh - it was suddenly cancelled?! OK, enough already - leave the paranoia to Gates and FBI!
NSF and its contractor, Raytheon Polar Services Company, immediately isolated the entire station's computer network to prevent future moves
by the hacker. For part of each day the station is naturally isolated from the Internet because of limited satellite coverage, and by the time satellite access returned the next day the NSF team had locked down the station while beginning to restore essential services such as email and telemedicine and to isolate the known hacked computers from the local network.
FBI next paid the bad guys, tracked the credit card used for the payment and also the computer used for setting up the deals. Local Romanian police crashed the site and busted the South Pole cyber criminals.
In May, the South Pole Station is closed to the outside world - temperatures approach 70 degrees below zero; aircraft cannot land for another six months except in extreme cases for medical emergencies; and the computer network is the main connection for the 58 wintering scientists and support contractors to maintain a lifeline to the outside world for scientific data transmission, station operations, medical support and emotional contact with family and friends.
The South Pole Station is a unique laboratory for scientific research where scientists deploy powerful radio telescopes that look out to the fringes of the universe to study its birth, and detectors buried in the ice measure neutrinos from cataclysmic events in outer space, among other cool stuff. To publish the data wouldn't have been too much of a big deal - scientists instead feared that the hackers would erase important research material.
Wired mag reports that Romania is hub of many cyber scams out off internet cafes. They create pirate E-bays or sell electronics that never reach the buyer. They set up fake PayPal escrow accounts. Some hack into secret corporate databases and demand ransom for the content. Says Wired; "This past summer, authorities aided by FBI experts arrested six young Romanians in the Transylvania town of Sibiu after they successfully extorted $50,000 from several leading American corporations, which were not identified."
ExplorersWeb too have been subject to similar scams. They call over AT&T relay service, more commonly used by the deaf who type in their call message which is then read to the phone call recipient by an AT&T operator. They said they were from a church and that they wanted to purchase sat phones for their minister - in Nigeria! They even provided a valid credit card number.
We tracked the card to a woman in Texas. Her husband answered the phone and said that she was in Paris (France; not Paris/Texas) - and subject to identity theft. The trouble with the Romanian band is that they have bundled with foreign accomplices. So whether you are at the South Pole, on Everest or in New York city - beware of some of the high tech Romanians..:)
Image of the South Pole station courtesy of http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/amanda.html
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