Youthful hacker proves a point

An 18 year old hacker has been thwarted in his efforts to blackmail Sweden's leading Internet service provider (ISP), Telia Internet.

The unnamed youth stole 3,000 customer passwords from Telia's secure Web site on Thursday, and posted them for public download. He wanted Telia to change its pricing scheme to a flat-rate model, rather than charging for Internet access by the minute.

Olle Waktel, head of Telia Internet, told Silicon News: "He stole an old file and 90 per cent of the passwords are obsolete. We believe we have his name and we hope to file charges today." Waktel would not disclose how many customers were affected by the attack but promised to change all the active, stolen passwords by 27August.

"Flat-rate pricing models are used in the US, but they do not work in Europe," Waktel continued. "We have to consider dial-up costs and transatlantic carrier costs."

Telia Internet, a division of Sweden's national telco operator, Telia, charges 0.115 Swedish krona per minute for its service, on top of a monthly fee.

Marcus de Ferranti, co-founder of bandwidth and telco broker, Band-X, said new technology could make time-based pricing a thing of the past. "In three years, all networks will be based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). ISPs will be able to monitor the data packets relatively easily, and this could well lead to Internet access being priced per usage, not per hour," he told Silicon News.

Waktel objected, saying: "Prices based on the size of a download would be too confusing for the average consumer." But he did concede that time-based pricing is expensive for people who use the Internet a lot, such as the password hacker. "We may consider offering a separate service for advanced computer users, if our surveys show there is demand for it. But we do not respond to blackmail," he said.