NASA Hacker Arrested in Romania

Razvan Manole Cernaianu, perhaps better known as Tinkode, the hacker who gained notoriety after allegedly compromising a number of websites, including those of NASA, the European Space Agency, and Sun Microsystems, was recently arrested in Romania.

According to a statement released by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), the 20 year-old from Timisoara, Romania hacked into servers belonging to the U.S Army and stole confidential information. He later posted video demonstrations of the hack on his blog, where visitors could also buy a computer program, which he designed, that could hack sites in a similar fashion.

Additionally, in March of last year, Cernaianu is believed to have been half of a team that breached the security of MySQL.com, the Web site for the open source database product.

The Associated Press is reporting that Romanian prosecutors are cooperating with authorities from NASA and the FBI.

“[Cernaianu] used sophisticated hacking tools to gain unauthorized access to government and commercial systems,” the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest told the Associated Press, “…[demonstrating that] countries and agencies around the globe [could cooperate] …to counter these types of threats.”