Can You Trust Your Cell Phone, PDA, Blackberry...?

SecurityFocus writer Kevin Poulsen continues to provide some of the best original security reporting in his new story Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems. This is an absolutely fascinating must-read. From the story:

"By August 5th the agents already had a good idea what was going on, when Ethics made a fateful mistake. The hacker asked the Secret Service informant for a proxy server -- a host that would pass through Web connections, making them harder to trace. The informant was happy to oblige. The proxy he provided, of course, was a Secret Service machine specially configured for monitoring, and agents watched as the hacker surfed to "My T-Mobile," and entered a username and password belonging to Peter Cavicchia, a Secret Service cyber crime agent in New York.

Cavicchia was the agent who last year spearheaded the investigation of Jason Smathers, a former AOL employee accused of stealing 92 million customer e-mail addresses from the company to sell to a spammer. The agent was also an adopter of mobile technology, and he did a lot of work through his T-Mobile Sidekick -- an all-in-one cellphone, camera, digital organizer and e-mail terminal. The Sidekick uses T-Mobile servers for e-mail and file storage, and the stolen documents had all been lifted from Cavicchia's T-Mobile account, according to the affidavit. (Cavicchia didn't respond to an e-mail query from SecurityFocus Tuesday.)

By that time the Secret Service already had a line on Ethic's true identity. Agents had the hacker's ICQ number, which he'd used to chat with the informant. A Web search on the number turned up a 2001 resume for the then-teenaged Jacobsen, who'd been looking for a job in computer security. The e-mail address was listed as ethics@netzero.net.

The trick with the proxy honeypot provided more proof of the hacker's identity: the server's logs showed that Ethics had connected from an IP address belonging to the Residence Inn Hotel in Buffalo, New York. When the Secret Service checked the Shadowcrew logs through a backdoor set up for their use -- presumably by the informant -- they found that Ethics had logged in from the same address. A phone call to the hotel confirmed that Nicolas Jacobsen was a guest."

I strongly recommend reading the whole article for context, but the four italicized sections yield some interesting lessons:

- Intruders: Don't trust proxies you don't own. Don't post your resumes online. Trust no one!
- Agents: Don't store sensitive information on technology or services you don't control or thoroughly understand.