Scott Levine, 45, of Boca Raton was indicted by a federal grand jury in Arkansas for allegedly breaking into Acxiom's servers and downloading 8.2 gigabytes of data in what the U.S. Justice Department called one of "the largest cases of intrusion of personal data to date." Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, operates the world's largest repository of consumer data and counts as customers major banks, credit card companies, insurers and the U.S. government.
Levine could not be reached through e-mail or on the phone Wednesday. While the Snipermail.com site is now offline, a company Web page stored by Archive.org in early 2003 touts Snipermail.com's "opt-in" mailing lists and stresses that "subscribers to that list have stated that they want to receive promotional messages."
Snipermail.com has drawn fire from antispam advocates in the past for falsely claiming to operate only "opt-in" lists. The company's domain name shows up on the Register of Known Spam Operations compiled by the Spamhaus Project, and 63 sightings of spam from Snipermail.com appear on Usenet's abuse-sightings discussion group.
Acxiom did not reply to questions about how many Americans were affected by the alleged disclosure. The company provided a statement saying that since 2003, "We've improved our intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning and encryption systems, enhanced our internal and external audit practices, and are fully committed to working with our clients and outside experts to ensure continuous improvement in our security environment...There is no indication that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches."
