Man Gets 10 Years for VoIP Hacking

IDG News Service — A Venezuelan man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service.

Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served.

The first person to be charged

Pena is the first person to be charged by U.S. authorities with VoIP hacking, but he almost avoided prosecution. He skipped bail after his arrest, and was only captured after his Mexican girlfriend turned him in in early 2009.

Pena worked with Spokane, Washington, hacker Robert Moore to launch brute force attacks against the VoIP networks. Moore wrote computer programs that tried, again and again, to guess important prefix codes, which were then used to authorize traffic on the networks. Some of these codes were just four-digit numbers.

The hacked networks

Once he had access to the hacked networks, Pena operated as if he were a legitimate Internet phone wholesaler, selling telephone services to businesses at deeply discounted rates.