The Glaswegian-born systems administrator, who attended Highgate Wood Secondary School in north London, is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002, using the name 'Solo'. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force.
The US authorities claim he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
In an interview televised on the BBC's Click programme,[40] McKinnon claimed that he was able to get into the military's networks simply by using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords; in other words his report suggests that there were computers on these networks with the default passwords active.
The charge that he perpetrated "the biggest military hack of all time" is ridiculed by McKinnon who characterises himself as a "bumbling computer nerd" who undestructively accessed open, unsecured machines while under the influence of cannabis, and that the destruction claims were manufactured by embarrassed US authorities after the fact.
McKinnon was using a 56k modem.
A senior military officer at the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph: " He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and Nasa computers and left silly and anti-America messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems.
