A New Kind of Hack Attack

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Psst! Want to buy some pictures of Paris Hilton naked? Oh, you already have some. To the glee of Internet voyeurs, someone hacked Hilton's Sidekick II, a wireless phone/camera/PDA/Internet terminal sold by T-Mobile. The hacker then spilled its contents online, including numbers of celeb pals such as Ashlee Simpson and Eminem, along with photos of a topless Hilton cavorting with Eglantina Zingg, a VJ for MTV Latin America. The intruder didn't hack the Sidekick; he nailed the server that stored Hilton's personal data.

And Hilton's not alone. Some 400 T-Mobile customers were hacked, the company admitted. Just days before Hilton's exposure came to light, Nicholas Jacobsen, 22, pleaded guilty to computer fraud for hacking T-Mobile. He was nabbed in a government investigation of the Internet underworld. Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, says the ChoicePoint scam and T-Mobile hack "show that companies don't take seriously the need to keep our information safe." The solution? Don't store any truly sensitive information on a wireless device and, when possible, disable wireless features that connect users to the Net, such as Bluetooth, which can serve as a back door to hackers. Celebs aren't the only ones at risk. Before he was caught, Jacobsen was reportedly amusing himself by reading the e-mail of another Sidekick customer: a Secret Service agent assigned to hunt down cybercrooks. --Reported by Sandra Marquez/Los Angeles