JERUSALEM -- A 20-year-old Israeli cracker behind last year's organized attacks against US military and government computer systems was indicted Tuesday on charges of conspiracy and harming computer systems.
Four other Israelis, considered his pupils, were indicted along with Ehud Tenebaum, who was arrested in Israel in March 1998 after an intensive investigation by multiple US agencies.
Tenebaum, who calls himself Analyzer, and a teenage collaborator in Northern California, known as Makaveli, claimed credit in March for a string of hacker assaults on US military computers.
The Israeli indictment said that in 1997 and early 1998 Tenebaum and his four proteges breached computers in Israel and in the United States using a Trojan-horse program to obtain access and a sniffer program to obtain passwords. Tenebaum claimed to have access to more than 400 military computer systems.
All five were charged with using the Internet to infiltrate computers at Harvard, Yale, MIT, NASA, and the US Navy, as well as sites of Israeli ISPs, where they obtained the names and passwords of subscribers.
Three of the five were charged with destroying evidence.
The Justice Department said last spring that while intrusions into US military computers were treated as serious incidents, no classified information was ever compromised.
No trial date was set.
Reuters contributed to this report.
