"I deliberately chose an older news story to edit, which had scrolled off the front page, as a courtesy to Yahoo!. ...[My] actions required no password, just some very detailed analysis of Yahoo! internal URL structure and hostnames."

A few months later Lamo broke into the New York Times' internal computer network, where he added his name to the paper's confidential database of experts. That deed earned him a hefty fine and three years' probation.

January 2007: On Jan 17, 2007, Insight Magazine--a Web site owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon--published a story claiming that researchers working for Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign had discovered that then-Senator Obama was educated at a madrassa in Indonesia.

The story, which listed no author and named no sources, was spread far and wide by talk radio and Fox News, only to , the Associated Press, the New York Times, and others. Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns denounced the story, and .