"ANAKATA" TRIAL BEGINS 2 SEPT. IN DENMARK - ONE CANNOT REMOTELY CONTROL A PERSONS COMPUTER THEN CHARGE HIM WITH HACKING

He almost never went anywhere without his laptop. When the police at noon June 5 last year, knocked on his door, he ran away. He did not have shoes on, but then ran away in stocking feet. The only thing he got on the flight, was the laptop. When officers declared him arrested Thomas Laub Street in the East of Copenhagen, he had the computer under one arm.
Since that day, the now 21-year-old IT consultant been in custody in jail in Ringsted, separated from his Lenovo Thinkpad computer. It has been ahead of the Copenhagen police investigators and National Police personnel. They have struggled to penetrate the encrypted computer. In vain. Although, the IT experts did not wish to disclose passwords, just as he has refused to speak to police about the case in samfulde 15 months.
The silent young man and his burglarproof computer is the great unknown when the trial about what the authorities call “Denmark’s greatest hacker attacks,” starting tomorrow, Tuesday 2 September.
The 21-year-old Dane, along with the well-known 29-year-old Swedish hacktivist Gottfrid Svartholm Warg charged through nearly five months to have exploited a vulnerability in the IT systems at the state’s largest IT supplier CSC, to copy data from police confidential records .
The prosecution’s case is that the National Police records downloaded a large number of files with eg four million driver’s license numbers and information about missing persons. The two defendants could face up to six years in prison for felony hacking and extensive disruptions to public infrastructure.

Guilty or innocent chat

Since the police have not been able to hack his way into the young IT consultant’s laptop, the prosecution’s case against the Dane instead built around a live Internet chat, which took place on 13 and 14 February 2012.
At the time, the accused Dane 18 years old. The alias ‘Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat’ or ‘APPT’ led in the chat conversations with a ‘My Evil Twin’, according to police data covers the Swedish IT activist Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. The chat is pulled out of logs from Gottfrid Black Holms computer by Swedish police and subsequently sent to the Danish colleagues.
Starting on Tuesday will the prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General Anders Riis field, trying to convince the judge and eight tried by jury in the Court of Frederiksberg that the 18-year-old Dane in the chat called Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to from his home in Cambodia to hack into systems at CSC. And the prosecutor will explain that the Dane also via chat gave the Swede a tool to break in with: among other things, a number of Danish police officers passwords to the CSC computers, which contains millions of sensitive information on all Danish citizens.
Both the accused pleads not guilty to the charges.
The silent Dane is far the mystery. When he June 6, 2013 were prepared in a preliminary hearing, said defense attorney on his behalf that he pleaded not guilty. That’s all. He has never once allowed himself to be questioned by the police, and he has not said a word through regular hearings in which a judge had to decide whether his detention should be extended. Most of the hearings he attended did not, because he previously had agreed to be in jail, where he has been subject to strict letter and visit control.
It’s his defense attorney, Michael Juul Eriksen, who has invited him to remain silent.
“But he is ready to speak in court. My assessment was that the matter had gone up, he was imprisoned anyway, and then we would wait to come up with an explanation to the judges who finally judge the case ‘.
The question is whether the silence and the lack of help with the police investigation of hacker case will not work incriminating themselves.
“No, I think everyone can understand that it has no duty to, and that it is not our task to help the police. And again it is on the advice of me and it is my job to help my client the best possible way, “said Michael Juul Eriksen.
Apart from the defense attorney, nobody knows what the 21-year-old is going to say when he was at the trial for the first time gives his version of the case.

Visited by PET

The young man in jail is described by his peers as a computer genius with a photographic memory.
“If he saw me enter a password, he would remember it for life. Therefore, he asked to be warned, then you could even turn his head away when I was logging me into a place, “said one of the 21-year-old acquaintances.
Until he was put behind bars, he kept to the left radical – also called autonomous – circles in Nørrebro in Copenhagen without even being particularly interested in politics. He came into the center of the environment, when in late 2010 moved into a commune near Blågårdsgade, where also a leading figure on the far left had the address. A former resident of the collective says that the hacker now accused man was different:
“We gave a hell of a housewarming party, and I invited all my friends autonomous. I was astonished as his guests showed up: He had friends in all sorts of different environments and found it easy to deal with all kinds of people. He is a decent and pleasant guy simply ‘.
The description goes back to friends who have met him one hour a week in which he has had visits in Ringsted under police supervision:
“He located with the hard-boiled criminals, some of them callous people, but the ones he can find out about.”
He has no education, but his extraordinary skill with a computer made him in demand from many quarters.
17 years old, he worked as an IT consultant for one of the country’s major accounting firms, and shortly after his 18th birthday in the spring of 2011 he told his surroundings on an unusually urgent job offer: Security Intelligence Service would like to make use of his IT talents. Many around him heard the stories of how agents for PET suited him up when he left his place of work, or waiting for him outside his residence. Invited him at the hotel. Flattered him, and promised that they would not want him to spy on his left-wing friends.
Sources in his entourage also says that he finally felt under pressure from the pet because he rejected the insistent offer.
“He felt uncomfortable, that they watched him,” says a friend.
If pressure was the cause is unknown, but at some point in 2011 traveled the 18-year old man to Brisbane, Australia, where he worked for an IT security company. According to the rumor, he traveled in March 2012 – a month before the IT systems at CSC was hacked the first time – a week to Cambodia.
At the time, lived the other now accused in the great hackersag Swede Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Senior Prosecutor at Copenhagen Police Maria Cingari announced during a court hearing in June that while the young Dane stayed in Cambodia, in the course of a single night from Black Holms computer in Phnom Penh made 50 unsuccessful attempts to enter the system at CSC in Denmark.
Prosecutor Anders Riis Ager would not before the trial to give further details on the Dane’s trip to Cambodia.
“But let me put it this way: The accused’s comings and goings, including his travel, travel routes and stopping places, of course interesting and is part of the evidence.”
The image can be pieced together from sources around the young IT specialist, says that he returned to Denmark from Australia in the autumn of 2012 and that he had distanced themselves from at least some of his former circle of friends.

Battered and remote

At that time, there has been a dramatic development in Cambodia. Here, the historical hacker case another protagonist, Swedish Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, lived in an apartment on the 1st floor of Cadillac Bar & Grill on the river in Phnom Penh. The man who in computer circles under the name ‘Anakata’, was typical here in front of his MacBook Pro, a laptop that had become so worn that the keyboard was missing six keys.

His access to the Internet stopped abruptly when he August 30, 2012 was arrested after an international inquiry. According to the Public Prosecutor in Copenhagen was August 30 also the last day that hackers had unauthorized access to systems at CSC. The hackers had at the time indulged in IT systems and had access to a variety of public records in nearly five months. Neither CSC or the National Police, the confidential data was copied, discovered ever even what happened to them.
Although the hack stopped while Gottfrid Black Holms computer was confiscated, and although part of the stolen data from the National Police was found in the waste Mac, it’s not proof enough in itself. The Danish defender of Gottfrid Svartholm, Luise High, will in the Court of Frederiksberg try to explain to the jury that Svartholm Wargs computer was remotely controlled by persons unknown men. The explanation did the Swedish hacktivist was acquitted of a similar case, which was part of a large-scale hackersag in Sweden – a case that all CSC affair originates.
As his Danish co-defendants considered Gottfrid Svartholm Warg a computer genius. When he Swedish police were brought home to Sweden from Cambodia, he was already world famous, because he was just 17-year-old co-founded and computer brains behind the world’s largest file-sharing service The Pirate Bay. The service allows users to exchange data files with one another – for example, movies, music, e-books and computer programs.
In that way, Svartholm among other entertainment giants such as Warner, Sony and Disney against them. In their view, he had created a tool to circumvent their monopoly on the products and thus threatened the companies’ opportunities to earn money. Pirate Bay’s four founders, among them Gottfrid Svartholm, was in the spring of 2009 was sentenced to one year in prison each and a joint combined fines and damages of 30 million kronor.
Gotfrid Svartholm disappeared to Cambodia, where he in 2012, more than three years later, was brought back to Sweden. The police believed that Svartholm from the apartment in Phom Penh had been behind the largest hacker attacks in Swedish history. It had hit the IT company Logica, which like CSC in Denmark operates a number of computer systems for public authorities, among others, the police, in addition to another IT company, applicate, and Nordea.
Svartholm confessed to having hacked applicate, but refused to be broken into Logica and Nordea. In the district court, he was convicted of it all and got two years in prison. In the appellate court, he was acquitted in the Nordea case and got the sentence reduced by half after the defender had got a new, crucial witness.
The acquittal in Sweden is interesting because Svartholm in the Danish case will use exactly the same argument as the one that got him off the hook in the Nordea case in Sweden: Svartholm did not try to run from that hacked at Nordea had happened from his MacBook computer in Cambodia. But the prosecutor could reverse not prove that it was Gottfrid Svartholm itself, which had operated it.
Against this background, wrote Svartholm in the fall, shortly before his extradition for prosecution in Denmark, a letter to the Danish Justice Minister for Economic Affairs and Minister of the Interior:
“Dear Morten Bødskov and Margrethe Vestager. I am sincerely sorry that my computer has been used in a way that has caused damage in Denmark. (…) The (Swedish) Court of Appeals has said that my computer’s firewall has been configured in a way so there is no guarantee of integrity of your computer and the remote control of it can be made in a variety of ways. Therefore I can not be held responsible for what might have been found on the computer. “

Star Hacker on the witness stand

In the Swedish appeal was the testimony about exactly that point from a recognized hacker and IT specialist crucial. The witness was the American Jacob Appelbaum. He never completed training – dropped out of high school – but are considered to be among the sharpest when it comes to swerve on the internet and in large computer systems.

Appelbaum is one of the main men behind the so-called Tor network that makes it possible to move on the Internet completely anonymously. He has worked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and he was among the few experts who helped pick the documents from the NSA defector Edward Snowden, who shocked the world when they were published in 2013.
At home, the prosecution noted that Jacob Appelbaums witness testimony was crucial to Gottfrid Black Holms partial acquittal in Sweden. And the prosecutor Anders Riis Ager has tried to prevent Gottfrid Black Holms defender in bringing the American celebrity hacking into the courtroom at Frederiksberg. As a prologue to the trial judge had to August 20 relate to that from the State Attorney’s page »’s claims that it does not allow the defender to lead Jacob Appelbaum as a witness,” it says in the rule book.
Deputy District Attorney Anders Riis Ager has two arguments for keeping Appelbaum away from the courtroom in Frederiksberg:
“When Appelbaum has not seen or experienced anything of the case, a call for him in court action that he has some knowledge of computers. But I have not seen documented. On the Internet, I can only see that he is a hacker. I can not see that he has taken some training in it. The second is that Appelbaum does not have the independence that it should have if you have to deliver something that can be interpreted as an expert’s report, “said Anders Riis field.
Prosecutor refers among other things to make some comments on Twitter that Appelbaum wrote in connection with his witness statement in Sweden in September last year:
“It is clear to me that #Anakata (Svartholm Warg, ed.) Is a political prisoner; Prosecutor, police and # Sapo (Swedish intelligence, ed.) do not understand the technical evidence, “he wrote, among other things.
Anders Riis Field rejects the prosecution’s attempt to prevent Appelbaums witness statement about removing technical arguments that Gottfrid Svartholm Wargs computer was remotely.
“No.. But irrelevant witnesses to be cut off, otherwise we will never finish the main negotiations. You can google your way to that Appelbaum has repeatedly stated that Warg is politically doomed and political prisoner in Sweden, which is a little bizarre point of view. You’re not an independent source, if you believe that there are political prisoners in Sweden ‘.
Frederiksberg District Court dismissed the prosecution’s claim, and Jacob Appelbaum can now be called as an expert witness:
“The Court finds that it can not be denied that the testimony of Jacob Appelbaum may be relevant to the defense of the accused Warg,” was the justification.

Report criticizes police and CSC

At the Swedish computer genius is politically doomed and political prisoner, is a perception that recur in international IT activist circles. Also, the defendants Dane acquaintances and his defenders believe that police and prosecutors have been unusually numerous stops to find scapegoats, which can cover the CSC and their sole failure in the case.
Politiken has previously revealed how the National Police and CSC failed to respond to a critical audit report on IT security, which was delivered in June 2012 in the midst of hacker attack. IT technical experts have pointed out that the hack could have been discovered and limited if the National Police or the CSC had immediately launched an impact assessment of the IT systems.
In the past week, two reports of the hack, prepared by the Military Intelligence Service. One is a technical report on the attack, which is kept secret. The second is CSC criticism for having been vulnerable systems, while the National Police receive criticism for having driven too little control over its IT supplier.
On top of the reports, the National Police admitted that security at CSC and the National Police’s control of its IT supplier was inadequate. And in response to the Unity List spokesman Pernille Skipper, said Attorney General Karen Hækkerup (S), the National Police are now looking to the police its IT supplier for poor accuracy. In addition, there may be a claim for damages if the National Police believe that CSC has breached the contract for IT operations.
For its part, maintains CSC in a short written response to Politiken that the company could not have acted differently, since the hacker attack “exploited a vulnerability in the IT system, which up to that time was unknown to the industry.”
“CSC has not received a claim from the National Police, and CSC believes that the attention of the authorities is properly focused on the perpetrators of this crime,” writes Jette Aagaard Madsen, CSC Scandinavia director of the public sector.
Meanwhile more CSC, that during the course of the trial will raise a demand of 6-7 million against Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and the Danish IT consultant to replace hacker attack damage to IT systems.
Dane defender, Michael Juul Eriksen says that CSC and their sole security failures will become part of the trial, when CSC makes a claim against his client.
“If it really is so sensitive information can do so much damage, is it a bit odd that there are some systems set up, better suited to the information. There are differences in how to punish a person who has collected 1,000 crowns up on the street, in relation to a person who breaks into a bank and steals 1,000 crowns, “he said.
Police have several times during the course looked unlucky out. At first hackers in almost five months up and messing with police records without anyone noticing. Then the police responded with more than a month’s delay on the tip of the hacker attack that Swedish police gave in January 2013.
And finally, there is the computer that the young Dane had under his arm, when his escape attempt was prevented. In hearing after hearing, the prosecutor through 15 months explained that “the police are still working to gain access to his computer.”
When the trial begins, it will be clear that it never succeeded.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has Politiken permission to bring his name and likeness in connection with the reporting of the case.