Teenager known as “Uppsala Hacker” may be charged with stealing Cisco’s source code

By Janine de Blois

The Swedish Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of 19 year old from Uppsala for hacking into 3 Swedish Universities and the Swedish National Supercomputer Center in Linkoping.

In an ongoing FBI investigation, the same hacker is thought to be responsible for stealing sample source code files from Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS).

Two of the codes were posted on a Russian website in 2004-about 2.5MB of the more than 800MB believed stolen. This is around the same time as the charges he has been found guilty of occurred. He was 16 at the time.

The US, through the FBI, has made a request to complete its investigation into the Cisco hack and is working with the US and Swedish departments of justice to bring forth charges. Regarding the evidence found on his computer the teen hacker admits having made the tools used in the hacks, but insists he didn’t use them himself-that others’ had access.