, Newsbytes 2002-02-01
Scott Charney led '90s-era hacker crackdown
Scott Charney, who Microsoft named Thursday as its chief security strategist, spent most of the 1990s at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he headed the division responsible for computer crimes.
In replacing Howard Schmidt, who left Microsoft to become the Bush administration's electronic security advisor, Charney will be assuming responsibilities for what the Redmond, Wash., company calls its "Trustworthy Computing" drives.
"As one of the industry's top computer security experts, Scott has wide-ranging experience in cybercrime and computer forensics, which will make him an essential member of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing leadership team," Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, said in a prepared statement. "Scott takes a long-term, industry-wide perspective on security strategy and understands the critical challenge of building safe and secure software and services for our customers and the industry."
Most recently, Charney was a principal for PricewaterhouseCoopers' Cybercrime Prevention and Response Practice, which he joined in 1999.
At the DOJ, the Syracuse University law school graduate may have been best known for his early '90s prosecution of a group of teenager hackers known as the Masters of Deception (MOD).
Led by Phiber Optik, the holder of what may be the best-known handle among phone phreaks and crackers since Cap'n Crunch, the MOD's major preoccupation seemed to be a sort of electronic gang war against Phiber Optik's former hacking pals, a group that called itself the Legion of Doom (LOD).
In 1993, while attempting to out-hack LOD members in the nation's phone systems and in government and banking-system databases, the MOD became the first such group to be caught by Charney's team through the use of wiretaps.
Microsoft said that, while Charney was at the DOJ, he wrote its criminal division's policy on appropriate computer use and workplace monitoring, and other computer-security policies.
Before arriving at the DOJ in 1991, Charney was an assistant district attorney in Bronx County, N.Y., and deputy chief of its investigations bureau. There, Microsoft said, Charney headed the development of a computer system used throughout the city to manage the tracking of criminal cases.
