This is old news, but I'm putting it up because it is interesting. It is also one of the first arrests for wardriving.
A federal appeals court upheld a nine-year prison term Monday for a hacker who tried and failed to steal customer credit-card numbers from the Lowe's chain of home improvement stores.
Brian Salcedo, now 23, has been in custody since 2003, when an FBI stakeout caught him and a partner breaking into several Lowe's networks over an unsecured Wi-Fi connection at a suburban Detroit store.
Under Monday's ruling, Salcedo will not be eligible for release until May 2011.
Assistant U.S. attorney Matthew Martens, who prosecuted the case, said the sentence is long, but appropriate. "I hope it achieves, not only justice in this case, but deterrence to other people thinking about doing something similar," Martens said.
Salcedo's partner in the abortive caper, 22-year-old Adam Botbyl, has less than two months left on a sentence of 26 months for his role in the plot. After serving most of that time in custody, Botbyl is now in a halfway house in Detroit.
According to court records, Botbyl stumbled across the unsecured wireless network at the Southfield, Michigan, Lowe's in the spring of 2003, while he and a roommate were wardriving the area in search of Wi-Fi hot spots.
He returned six months later with Salcedo, who was on the last month of a three-year probation term from a juvenile computer crime conviction. Together, the pair discovered they could jump from the Southfield Lowe's to the company's central data center in North Carolina, and from there to the local networks at stores around the country.
Read more at wired.comTags: wi-fi hacker lowe nine+years detroit michigan
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