VoiP mastermind hacker gets 10 years

A 27 year-old Venezuelan man was sentenced to 10 years prison on Friday for selling 10 million minutes he had stolen from US voice-over IP (VoIP) providers.

Endwin Andres Penas was the mastermind behind the operation he had run with convicted hacker Robert Moore, who was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2007 for his role in the scheme.

Pena had sold "deeply discounted" voice call rates to business customers by running VoIP traffic over providers' networks that Moore had compromised, according to the US Attorney's office of the District of New Jersey.

According to records from the US carrier AT&T, Moore had conducted six million scans in search of vulnerable network ports.

Pena would program vulnerable networks to accept his customers' VoIP traffic.

In a 2007 interview with Information Week, Moore said that the most common weakness in the VoIP providers' networks was default passwords.

The United States Attorney District of New Jersey office said the operation had cost VoIP providers some US$1.4 million.

Pena was re-captured in 2009 in Mexico after eluding authorities since an earlier 2006 arrest.

He was also ordered to pay over US$1 million in restitution.