Romanian hacker SirVic, who broke into NASA systems thanks Slovenian authorities for refusing US extradition

A Romanian hacker who was arrested in Slovenia following a routine road search in October 2013 was released, after the Slovenian authorities refused to extradite him to the US. The Romanian Victor Faur, who broke into the NASA and US Navy servers nine years ago, was arrested by the Slovenian authorities based on an international arrest warrant. Faur, nicknamed SirVic, comes from the Western Romanian city of Arad – the city which hosted another alleged hacker, Guccifer, recently taken into custody by Romanian Police. The Slovenian authorities decided not to extradite the Romanian as he had already being tried and convicted in his home country. He thanked the Slovenian authorities, and said that the US authorities knew there was no chance to have him extradited, but still they wanted to keep him in Slovenian arrest as long as possible. Faur was convicted to one year and four month in jail with parole in 2008 for having illegally accessed information systems of American Government institutions. The court also ordered him to pay USD 240,000 for hacking the NASA and US Navy systems in 2004 and 2006, which caused USD 1.5 million damages. During his trial in Romania, Faur said he only hacked the systems to prove they were vulnerable, and that he meant no harm. This is the second piece of news in a week concerning a Romanian hacker wanted internationally. Going by the handle Guccifer, the hacker, who is said to have broken into the email account of former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, was recently taken into Police custody in Romania. He was taken into custody form his home in Arad, in Western Romania, after the Romanian authorities collaborated with US services in finding him. The man, by his real name Marcel Lazăr Lehel, in his early 40s, has had repeated sentences for hacking. He is currently serving a year three year suspended sentence for breaking into the Facebook accounts of several employees of a Romanian media group, and making public some of the contents. Lehel was taken to the main headquarters of the Direction to Investigate organized Crime and Terrorism – DIICOT. In a press release, DICOT said there is reasonable suspicion that, during 2013, Lehel repeatedly breached security measures and entered the email accounts of Romanian public individuals, to get confidential data, then changed email passwords, locking the accounts for their rightful users. He also transferred data from the compromised e-mail accounts into his systems. He then made public some of the information, in order to damage the image of those whose accounts he had broken. Lehel, who was allegedly using the nicknames Guccifer and Little smoke/Micul Fum, is said to have hacked into the email account of Romania Intelligence Service SRI head George Maior, among others. He is also believed to have hacked the accounts of actors Steve Martin and Mariel Hemingway, as well as of a former CIA analyst Laura Manning Johnson. Among the most famous of his actions was hacking the e-mail of former state secretary Colin Powell, and revealing an alleged affair with Romanian MEP Corina Cretu. Powell denied the affair with the former presidential spokesman.