A prison sentence ordered for a Louisiana man for sending a malicious program using e-mail that caused Microsoft WebTV customers to call the 911 emergency service points out the wide variety of security threats recently in circulation. David Jeansonne, 44, pled guilty in February to charges of intentionally causing damage to computers and causing a threat to public safety, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte ruled he will and will have to spend an additional six months of home detention and pay $27,100 to Microsoft after he is released, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. WebTV, which is now known as MSN TV, is a Microsoft service that allows subscribers to browse the Web and connect to the Internet through their television sets, IDG News Service said. Jeansonne, in July, 2002, sent out e-mail messages to about 20 WebTV subscribers with an attachment that he claimed would change the WebTV display colors when opened. The attachment was actually a computer script that reprogrammed the recipient’s WebTV box to dial 911 instead of the local telephone number to access Microsoft’s WebTV servers. Around 10 users fell for the ruse, and local police departments around the country responded, sending officers to the homes of WebTV users in response to the 911 calls. Jeansonne was caught following an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecuted by the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office. The CHIP unit is involved in several security-related prosecutions. For example, on March 11, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that Robert Lyttle, 21, of Pleasant Hill, Calif. pleaded guilty in federal court in Oakland to hacking into government computers and then defacing government Websites with material illegally obtained from those intrusions. Lyttle, known as one of the members of the self-titled hacking group, called “The Deceptive Duo,” admitted that he unlawfully accessed computer systems of various federal agencies in April 2002, including the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistic Information Service, the Office of Health Affairs, and NASA’s Ames Research Center. In particular, Lyttle admitted that he: gained unauthorized access to a computer at NASA’s Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field, Calif., and obtained information from that computer for the purpose of defacing a Website hosted on the computer. Technology Industry