06-September-06, 12:14 PM
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| |  Web News: Phone Scam Charge Rocks HP
Phone Scam Charge Rocks HP  | Quote: |  | | |  | Originally Posted by Wired |  | | | | | | | | |
Hewlett-Packard fraudulently obtained private phone records while trying to trace a media leak, according to a former board member who resigned when he learned of the action.
Tom Perkins, one of the founders of Silicon Valley venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and an HP board member until May, resigned after learning that HP consultants posed as Perkins and other board members to obtain their confidential telecommunications records -- a tactic known as pretexting.
The investigation was intended to uncover the source of a CNET News.com article published in January describing a confidential planning session among board members that took place over several days at a California resort spa.
"This is the corporate governance equivalent of using an elephant gun to shoot a butterfly in a gun-free zone," said Perkins's attorney, Viet Dinh, a former Justice Department attorney and author of the Patriot Act who now teaches at Georgetown University law school. "The unfortunate truth is that one of the world's largest and most respected corporations may have used fraudulent practices to spy on its own directors."
Pretexting is a method whereby a third party calls a phone company and poses as a specific customer of the phone company in order to request records of the customer's phone calls. Such records generally contain the phone numbers of people called, the date and time of the call and the duration of the conversation.
Phone-record pretexting is not specifically covered by a federal law, although a federal law against pretexting financial records exists and there are some federal laws under which it conceivably could be prosecuted. Several states have passed laws that could cover pretexting as well. California, where Hewlett-Packard is based, is one state that has computer-crime and identity-theft laws under which pretexters can be prosecuted.
Perkins was not fully apprised of the extent of HP's investigation of board members or the methods being used until May 18, Dinh said. In a board meeting on that date, Patricia Dunn, chairman of the board of directors, announced that investigators had discovered the identity of the source for the CNET story.
After revealing the source's identity to the board, Dunn asked the individual to resign, although he refused to do so. (According to The Wall Street Journal, HP plans to publish a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Wednesday announcing that George Keyworth was the source, and that he will not be re-elected to the board because he disclosed confidential information to the press.)
Concerned about the methods that might have been used to discover the source's identity, Perkins contacted Larry Sonsini, long-time outside counsel for HP, who confirmed that outside investigators had used pretexting to obtain both cell-phone and landline records of board members, Dinh said. This led Perkins to contact his own phone carrier, AT&T, to discover whether his records had been obtained through pretexting.
According to a letter from AT&T to Perkins, on January 30th of this year, someone using the e-mail address Mike@yahoo.com set up an online billing account through the internet for Perkins' home phone number, using the last four digits of Perkins' Social Security number. Once the online billing account was established, the party had access to billing records for Perkins' local calls for December 2005 through January 2006. According to the AT&T letter viewed by Wired News, the party only looked at the bill for January 2006, the month the CNET story was published.
Around the same time, someone also made a failed attempt to set up an online account for Perkins' long-distance billing records. When that didn't work, the party called AT&T's customer care unit, which helped set up the online account while the party was on the line.
Although records for Perkins's long-distance calls were available through that online account for the months November 2005 through January 2006, that party viewed only the January 2006 billing period, according to the AT&T letter. The party who viewed the records used the e-mail address redsox9855@yahoo.com for reference to set up the account, although AT&T said the party who set up this account had the same IP address as the person who set up the account for the local billing records and used the e-mail address mike@yahoo.com
Dinh said he did not know how many board members were the victims of pretexting. It's also unclear whether HP used pretexting to obtain the phone records of the CNET reporters, Dawn Kawamoto and Tom Kravitz.
Perkins, a former member of the board of directors at Compaq, joined the HP board of directors after HP merged with Compaq. He retired from the board, but rejoined it shortly before HP CEO Carly Fiorina was fired in 2005.
Perkins resigned from the HP board three months ago, but the significance of the separation has not been made public until now. In his resignation letter to HP's board of directors, a copy of which Wired News obtained, Perkins said he was resigning "to protest the questionable ethics and the dubious legality of the chairman's methods."
Full Story at Wired
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