Ehud Tenenbaum

Biography

Tenenbaum was born in Hod HaSharon in 1979. He is known under the infamous hacker alias "Pink Pony". Tenenbaum became widely famous in 1998, when aged 19 years and while he was the head of a small group of hackers, he was arrested for hacking computers belonging to NASA, The Pentagon, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the Knesset, MIT and other American and Israeli universities such as Dharma and ComTEC. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other federally funded research sites, and the computer of Israeli President Ezer Weizman, as well as attempting to infiltrate the Israel Defense Forces' classified files. He also hacked into the computers of Palestinian terrorist groups, and claimed to have destroyed the website of Hamas. Tenenbaum installed on some of the servers packet analyzer and trojan horse software. At the time then-US Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre insisted was "the most organized and systematic attack to date" on US military systems. The military thought that they were witnessing a sophisticated Iraqi 'information warfare'. In an effort to stop the supposed Iraqi hackers the United States government assembled agents from the FBI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, NASA, the US Department of Justice, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the NSA, and the CIA. The government was so worried that the warning and briefings went all the way up to the President of the United States. The investigation, code-named "Solar Sunrise," eventually snared two California teenagers (screen names Mac and Stimpy) and Tenenbaum, but no Iraqi infowarriors. After their arrest, a subsequent probe led US investigators to Tenenbaum, who was arrested after Israeli police were given evidence of Tenenbaum's activities. Later, the FBI sent agents to Israel to question Tenenbaum.

Before he was sentenced, Tenenbaum served briefly in the Israel Defense Forces, but was released soon thereafter after he was involved in a traffic collision.

In 2001, Tenenbaum pleaded guilty, while stating that he wasn't attempting to infiltrate the computer systems to get a hold of secrets but rather to prove that the systems were flawed. Tenenbaum was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, from which he served only 8 months following the "Deri Law". After the attack the FBI made a short 18 minutes training video called, Solar Sunrise: Dawn of a New Threat that was sold as part of hacker defense course that was discontinued in September 2004.

In 2003, after being freed from prison, Tenenbaum founded his own Information security company called "2XS".

In September 2008, following an investigation by Canadian police and the US Secret Service, Tenenbaum and three accomplices were arrested in Montreal. Tenenbaum was charged with six counts of Credit card fraud, in the sum of approx. US$1.5 million. U.S. investigators suspected Tenenbaum of being part of a scam, in which the hackers penetrated financial institutions around the world to steal credit card numbers. They then sold these numbers to other people, who used them to perpetrate massive credit card fraud. He was later extradited to the United States to stand trial, and was in the custody of the US Marshals for more than a year. In August 2010, he was released on bond after agreeing to plead guilty.

In July 2012, after Tenenbaum accepted a plea bargain which may have involved cooperation in the investigation, New York district judge Edward Korman sentenced Tenenbaum to the time already served in prison. Tenenbaum was also ordered to pay $503,000 and given three years' probation.