Man is guilty of aiding L.A. Times hack
Former Reuters social media editor Matthew Keys faces up to 25 years in prison.
Matthew Keys, former deputy social media editor for the Reuters news agency, was convicted last week for his role in a conspiracy to hack Los Angeles Times and Tribune Co. servers.
Keys, 28, who also was a Web producer for KTXL-TV Fox 40 in Sacramento, a Tribune station, provided members of the hacker group Anonymous with login information for Tribune servers in 2010.
Though Keys faces up to 25 years in prison, U.S. attorney’s office spokeswoman Lauren Horwood said prosecutors are “likely” to seek less than five years.
Keys’ attorney, Jay Leiderman, said they will appeal after Keys’ sentencing, which is scheduled for Jan. 20 in Sacramento.
“He shouldn’t be doing a day in jail,” Leiderman said. “With love and respect, [the Times] story was defaced for 40 minutes when someone found it and fixed it in three minutes. What do you want, a year a minute?”
Keys, a managing editor for Grasswire, a news curation website, said he will continue to work until his sentencing.
Edward Snowden, who exposed the mass-surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, tweeted about Keys’ potential sentence, followed by #PrisonPolicy.
“I appreciate the support that everyone is sending my way,” Keys said in response. “This affects our ability to keep sources confidential. I hope they funnel that outrage and anger into progress.”
In their indictment, federal prosecutors alleged that Keys conspired with Anonymous members to access the Tribune servers “for the purpose of learning how to alter and damage” them. According to federal authorities, Keys provided a username and password for Tribune servers to hackers in an online chat room after he left KTXL in late October 2010.
A jury convicted Keys of one count of conspiracy to make changes to Tribune’s website and damage its computer systems, one count of transmitting malicious code and one count of attempting to transmit malicious code.
With the information from Keys, prosecutors say, a hacker accessed a news story on the Times website and changed a headline on a story about tax cuts to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337.”
“[T]hat was such a buzz having my edit on the LA Times,” the hacker, using the screen name “sharpie,” wrote to Keys, according to the indictment.
“Nice,” Keys, using the screen name “AESCracked,” allegedly replied.
Keys said he was using a virtual private network “to cover my tracks,” according to the indictment.
Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that Tribune spent more than $5,000 responding to the attack and restoring its systems.
According to the indictment, Keys conspired with hackers via a chat room known as “internetfeds.”
Keys had written about gaining access to the chat room and communicating with hackers in a blog post for Reuters last year. Keys said the chat room was a “top secret” place where “elite hackers assembled.”
“If there was a political or economic reason behind their mayhem, so much the better. If not, they did it for kicks,” he wrote of the hackers’ motivations for their attacks.
He wrote in the post about the hack on the Times site, without acknowledging any personal involvement.
Keys was fired from Reuters shortly after federal prosecutors launched their case against him, though the company said he was let go for social media activities.
“Although this case has drawn attention because of Matthew Keys’ employment in the news media, this was simply a case about a disgruntled employee who used his technical skills to taunt and torment his former employer,” U.S. Atty. Benjamin Wagner said in a statement. “Although he did no lasting damage, Keys did interfere with the business of news organizations, and caused the Tribune Co. to spend thousands of dollars protecting its servers.”
In an interview with The Times following his conviction, Keys used an expletive to describe the government’s case against him and tweeted the same sentiment. He said prosecutors went after him only after he published information in 2011 that he gleaned from unnamed online sources, and refused to cooperate with federal investigators in a separate probe.
He drew similarities between the case against him and the government seizure of Associated Press phone records and the prosecution of a New York Times reporter for refusing to divulge a source, as examples. He had no part in the hacking of the Times site, in which the headline of an article was defaced, he said.
U.S. Atty. Matthew Segal, lead prosecutor in the case, said Keys’ assertion that he was targeted by the government as retribution for his work and to have him reveal his sources was baseless.
Segal said the crime involved more than just the defaced headline on the Los Angeles Times website.
The jury heard evidence that Keys constructed several “back-door access points” for himself and others to enter the company’s servers. Jurors also heard testimony that it took months for the company to assess the damage, Segal said.
“This is not the crime of the century, but you cannot do this stuff,” he said. “It is illegal and for a good reason.”