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Security Guard Charged With Hacking Hospital Systems

He allegedly posted video of the activities to YouTube

By Robert McMillan

His undoing came when a member of his hacker group, called the Electronik Tribulation Army, boasted to security researcher Wesley McGrew and showed him screen shots of hacked machines. That hacker, who went by the name XXxxImmortalxxXX, claimed to have hacked the Carrell Clinic systems, but McGrew soon linked the crime to GhostExodus and handed over his findings to authorities.

The group also compromised computers used by the Dallas Police and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, (NASA) the FBI said in an affidavit. According to GhostExodus's journal he appears to have found a cross-site scripting bug -- a common Web programming error -- on NASA's Web site.

McGrew, a graduate student at Mississippi State University, said that it probably never occurred to GhostExodus to fake the videos he made. "It's a show of skill to his hacker peers," he said via instant message.

Still, the video is "pretty amazing," he added.

"He's a security guard at the hospital, but he's pretending to infiltrate a corporate office and he's running around with a hoodie on over his security guard uniform and installing botnet software on a hospital computer all to the Mission Impossible music," he said. "[You] can't make this stuff up."

Other stories by Robert McMillan

Copyright 2009 IDG News Service, International Data Group Inc. All rights reserved.

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