Man Admits Six Flags Computer Sabotage

Mark Daniel Kahn, age 27, of San Francisco, California, pled guilty today in federal court in Greenville, South Carolina, to intentionally causing damage to the computer system used by Six Flags Amusement parks. United States Circuit Judge William B. Traxler, Jr., of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting by designation at the district court, accepted the plea and will impose sentence at a later date. The maximum penalty Kahn can receive is a fine of $250,000 and imprisonment for 10 years.

Evidence established that in February 2004, Kahn disrupted the operation of a Six Flags website by inserting malicious code into interactive job application forms that were then submitted to Six Flags. Kahn inundated Six Flags with hundreds of bogus job applications bearing statements such as "THIS SITE WAS HACKED" and "FIX YOUR SITE!!! I’ll keep breaking it until you do." In the process of the hacks, Kahn left a message for his girlfriend that stated "I Love you, Laura." Six Flags Loss Prevention officials, together with a private computer security professional and agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ultimately linked this hacking activity to Kahn. During the hacks, Six Flags captured the Internet Protocol addresses from which the hacking occurred, and traced them back to websites used by Kahn, including his personal website where he posted blogs, pictures of his girlfriend Laura (the same person for whom he professed his love during the hacks), and pictures of cats. One of the pictures depicted a cat on a laptop computer keyboard with a website displayed on the monitor. By enlarging the picture of the monitor, investigators were able to identify the site displayed on the screen. They then visited the website and located posts under an online name associated with the hacker in which Kahn described his intrusion into the Six Flags computer system. Ultimately, the investigators located Kahn in the Greenville, South Carolina, area. They then met with Kahn by posing as persons wishing to consider him for a computer services position. During these meetings, Kahn made statements about his hack of the Six Flags system as an indication of his computer skills. Kahn later admitted his hacks to FBI agents who interviewed him.