From Deseret News archives:
Police seize computer
They have identified a man who may have spied on Y. students
The computer seized Wednesday morning does not belong to the man, who hasn't been contacted by police, campus police Lt. Arnie Lemmon said.
"We have developed a suspect," Lemmon said. "We will be interviewing that suspect next week."
Investigators would not say if the man was a BYU student, though one administrator previously told the Deseret Morning News he suspected an inside job. Police seized the computer from a person who is not a current student, Lemmon said.
A BYU detective and an FBI agent with expertise in computer forensics obtained a search warrant for the computer and its contents. They also have served three investigative subpoenas on e-mail providers and telephone companies in their attempt to track the complicated trail of the suspect, BYU Sgt. Jed Henrie said.
The investigation began April 21 when a student attendant noticed a strange icon on the screen of a computer in an open-access computer lab in the Widtsoe Building.
A search found the icon deeply hidden inside three additional machines and also uncovered its meaning — someone had loaded keystroke logger software on the four computers.
The sophisticated program recorded the keystrokes of more than 600 students and periodically sent the information to a Hotmail e-mail account.
Tracking the culprit from there has been tricky because he used a bogus name to sign up for the Hotmail account.
"It gets really convoluted as you start to investigate the IP addresses and e-mail and telephone accounts," Lemmon said. "You have to lay out an association flow chart to get a mental image of how this comes together."
The keystroke logger captured student passwords and other personal information, but none of the students has reported any identity theft or other unusual account activity to BYU administrators or police.
BYU immediately deleted the students' pilfered passwords from campus systems. The administration also sent an e-mail warning the affected students and instructing them to select new passwords for their campus accounts.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com
