Former AT&T Contractor Arrested, Charged with Unauthorized Access of Servers
| U.S. Attorney’s Office July 19, 2011 |
NEWARK, NJ—A New Mexico man is charged for allegedly stealing confidential business information stored on AT&T’s servers and posting it on a public file-sharing site, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.
Lance Moore, 21, of Las Cruces, New Mexico, was arrested this morning at his residence by special agents of the FBI. Moore is charged in a complaint with one count of accessing a protected computer without authorization. He is expected to make an initial appearance this afternoon in Las Cruces federal court.
“Publicizing a company’s confidential plans can have consequences in a competitive environment,” said U.S. Attorney Fishman. “Those trusted with access to secure systems are bound to respect that secrecy—not just by corporate policy, but also by federal law. This case shows how effective we can be when corporations work closely with law enforcement to thwart cyber criminals.”
According to the complaint unsealed today:
Moore was a customer support contractor at Convergys Corporation, a company that provided call center services to AT&T from its Las Cruces office. Moore was responsible for answering calls from AT&T’s mobile customers and troubleshooting their problems.
On April 10, 2011, Moore exceeded his authorized access to AT&T’s servers, downloading, among other things, thousands of spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, applications, and image, PDF, and other files concerning AT&T’s plans for its 4G data network and Long Term Evolution mobile broadband network. That same day, Moore posted the illegally downloaded files on Fileape.com, a public file-hosting site that promises user anonymity. Once uploaded to the site, the AT&T documents were available for public download.
On June 25, 2011, the computer hacking group LulzSec publicized that they had obtained confidential AT&T documents and made them publicly available on the Internet. The documents were the ones Moore had previously uploaded to Fileape.com.
The count with which Moore is charged carries a maximum potential penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
U.S. Attorney Fishman thanked special agents of the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Task Force in Newark and Las Cruces with the continuing investigation leading to the arrest. He also thanked AT&T and Convergys for their close cooperation.
The government is represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gurbir S. Grewal of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Section in the Office’s Economic Crimes Unit in Newark.
The charges and allegations contained in the complaint are merely accusations, and the defendant is considered innocent unless and until proven guilty.