AT&T Warns Workers not to be Duped by Hackers
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   Reuters, Jul 12 2002

   NEW  YORK,  July  12 (Reuters) - AT&T Corp. <T.N> has warned employees
   not  to  be  tricked into surrendering sensitive information about its
   network  to  hackers posing as colleagues or customers this weekend, a
   spokeswoman said on Friday.

   The  warning,  sent  in an e-mail to AT&T staff, came ahead of a major
   hackers  convention  in  New  York where some of the attendees plan to
   give  a  demonstration  of  "social engineering" techniques -- ways of
   getting  information  that can be used to break into computer networks
   from the people who run them.

   AT&T  workers  in  past  years  were tricked into giving out sensitive
   information  over  the  telephone  to  people  pretending  to be other
   employees or customers, according to the internal AT&T e-mail dated on
   Thursday.

   Recorded  telephone  calls  based on those exchanges have been sold as
   instructional  videos  to  would-be  hackers  at  the HOPE (Hackers on
   Planet Earth) conference, the e-mail said.

   This  year's  conference,  dubbed  H2K2,  started  on  Friday and runs
   through Sunday in New York City.

   "There  is a very high likelihood that AT&T will be a target again" on
   Sunday  afternoon, when a social engineering contest is scheduled, the
   e-mail said.

   "Remember,  you  do  not  want  to  be  the  lucky guest of honor on a
   telephone  call from the hacker conference this weekend with thousands
   of  hackers  listening  to  you  and  attempting  to  scam AT&T out of
   proprietary information," the e-mail warned. "Please be on guard."

   Cindy Neale, a spokeswoman for New York-based AT&T, told Reuters it is
   not unusual for the company to send out such internal notices.

   On  Friday,  attendees  of  one  conference session learned how to get
   access  to  telephone  company caller ID systems. In front of a packed
   room  of  several hundred, a hacker calling himself "Lucky225" tricked
   several  operators  at  Vancouver,  British Columbia-based Telus Corp.
   <T.TO>,  Canada's  second  largest  telephone company, into giving him
   access to the network by saying simply, "I'm an engineer."