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Hacker and sidekick Sidekick hack trick exposed

Social engineering rather than technical wizardry was responsible for the leak of Paris Hilton's address book onto the internet.

As reported by SC Magazine back in February, details of the socialite's world, including scores of celebrities' private phone numbers were posted on a Korean website, including pop princess Avril Lavigne, tennis player Andy Roddick and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst.

It is now claimed that hackers did not break into T-Mobile's network using high level computer skills, but simply made a phone call to an employee of the network provider and tricked them into giving out confidential information.

A young hacker told a reporter from the Washington Post how he and a group of fellow hackers fooled an employee at a T-Mobile store in Southern California into giving details of the company's customer account website including usernames and passwords the store used to access the site.

The group was able to get account details and telephone numbers of celebrities. From there they were able to reset Paris Hilton's Sidekick account and access the central server where her stored videos, texts and data files were kept.

"As soon as I went into her camera and saw nudes my head went jackpot!" The hacker told the Washington Post.

These file eventually found their way onto a number of websites and soon after that hundreds of news organizations picked up the story.

At the time of writing, T-Mobile was unavailable for comment.

www.t-mobile.com

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