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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: May 29, 2005 |
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Israeli police have arrested 18 people, including top business executives and private investigators, on charges they used sophisticated software to infiltrate their competitors' computer systems, police said Sunday.
The arrests, which took place over the past few days, were the result of a wide-ranging industrial espionage probe that implicated several top Israeli companies, including a satellite television company and a cellular telephone service provider.
"This is one of the gravest scandals in ... industrial and market espionage in Israel," said police Superintendent Roni Hindi, head of the special fraud investigation team.
The espionage involved the use of a so-called Trojan horse software program, which sits in the victim's computer and gives the hacker full access to the machine over the Internet, Hindi said. Unlike other Trojan horses, which are often sent out scattershot over the Internet, this one was specifically tailored to each computer it was spying on, he said.
The program was designed by Michael Haephrati, 41, who was arrested last week in Britain along with his wife, Ruth Brier-Haephrati, 28. The two were detained pending a June 3 extradition hearing.
Those arrested included a top executive from the YES satellite television company, private investigators who worked for the cellular phone companies Pele-Phone and Cellcom, and an executive with a company that imports Volvos and other vehicles into Israel. Stocks in Bezeq The Israel Telecommunication Corp., which owns Pele-Phone and controls YES, were down as much as 3.4% in Tel Aviv following release of the news.
Police were unable to estimate the extent of the damage from the espionage, but "it appears we are talking about a lot of money," Hindi said. "There are also companies abroad that were damaged. This is still being investigated," he said.
Ofir Katz Neriah, the lawyer for one of the suspects, Alex Weinstein, denied her client was guilty.
"The software is totally legal, the question is if the use that my client made of the software was illegal, and the answer is definitely not," Neriah said. |
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