Back to Home > Business > Tuesday, Jul 04, 2006 Technology Posted on Tue, Jul. 04, 2006 email thi... Area man indicted in data

A 19-year-old Maple Grove man has been arrested and charged by federal authorities with conspiring with four other young men to hack into a large database used by law-enforcement agencies and steal the personal information of several individuals.

The individuals affected are identified only by initials in the indictment, but according to a report in the Washington Post, the case involves stolen information about several celebrities, including hotel heiress Paris Hilton, actors Laurence Fishburne and Demi Moore, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Zachary Wiley Mann could face up to five years in prison for separate charges of conspiracy and computer fraud and up to two years in prison for a third charge of aggravated identity theft, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of Florida in Miami.

Mann could not be reached for comment Monday. He and the others all were arrested June 22 and released on bail, and the five men face arraignment in U.S. District Court in Miami on July 12, said Matt Dates, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Miami, who declined further comment on the cases.

The defendants are from across the country, but the U.S. attorney's office in Miami is handling the case. The hacked database, called Accurint, was owned by a company in Boca Raton, Fla., called Seisint.

Seisint was purchased by the database giant LexisNexis in September 2004, the complaint said. LexisNexis in April 2005 revealed that criminals may have gained access to the files of 310,000 people in breaches of its databases dating back to January 2003.

According to a criminal complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in Miami, Mann was part of a group of "avid computer users who participated in online communications with each other and with other individuals."

The others include Timothy C. McKeage, Justin A. Perras, Jason Daniel Hawks and Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, the complaint said. A report in the Washington Post on Saturday identified McKeage as 21, from Woonsocket, R.I.; Perras as 19, from New Bedford, Mass.; Hawks as 24, from Winston-Salem, N.C.; and Weinberg as 21, from Laguna Beach, Calif.

The complaint said McKeage planted a "Trojan horse" computer virus on the computer system of the Port Orange Police Department in Florida to gain access to the Accurint database that the police used.

McKeage provided Weinberg and other co-conspirators with fraudulently created user names and passwords that allowed access to the Port Orange Police Department's Accurint account.

Perras allegedly impersonated LexisNexis personnel to con his way into an Accurint account for the Denton County Sheriff's Department in Texas and then distributed user names and passwords to the group, too.

Sometime around Jan. 30, 2005, Mann obtained two Accurint reports with the names, address, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of two individuals, and around April 14, he posted portions of one of the reports on the Internet, the complaint said.

The Washington Post report said that Mann admitted in a phone interview that he had looked up the personal information of several celebrities, including Fishburne, but denied that anyone in the group tried to profit from the information.

"I don't think what we did was that bad," Mann said, according to the Post. "We never used anyone's identity. Besides, don't you think it's wrong that a company like that has all this information that's available to anyone who's willing to pay for it?"

U.S. Secret Service agents had seized Mann's computer in May 2005 in connection with the investigation. The Secret Service declined to comment Monday on the arrests.

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo covers telecommunications lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5475.

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