The Oasis Forum, an alliance of church leaders, lawyers and NGOs which is campaigning to force President Chiluba from office later this year, said in a statement yesterday that it was “horrified” at the insecurity in the once-peaceful nation.Mr Tembo was murdered in a climate of mounting political tension ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections expected in October.President Chiluba is only Zambia’s second leader since independence in 1964, and although the country has avoided civil war it has become one of the world’s poorest nations.. In the real world, Raphael Gray sat in a typically messy teenager’s bedroom in a small South Wales town. But on the internet, he was something else entirely: the self-styled “Curador” (from the Portuguese for “guardian”) whose mission was to expose the dangers of shopping on the Web. In the real world, Raphael Gray sat in a typically messy teenager’s bedroom in a small South Wales town. But on the internet, he was something else entirely: the self-styled “Curador” (from the Portuguese for “guardian”) whose mission was to expose the dangers of shopping on the Web.
To this end, he published the numbers, names and expiry dates of 6,000 credit cards and sent a shipment of Viagra to Bill Gates, head of Microsoft.It cost Mastercard and Visa a total of £2m to refund customers and replace their cards. “It’s not a victimless crime,” a Mastercard spokesman said.Gray yesterday paid the price for his arrogance.

He was sentenced on six counts of breaking into computer systems in the Britain, America and Canada, and two counts of “obtaining services by deception”.In what must have appeared a neat twist, the Viagra shipment was bought with a credit card bearing Mr Gates’s name, which he acquired from salesgate , a site based in Buffalo, New York state.But as if to underline the fact that Gray, 19, was not a top-line hacker – in fact more Sunday football than Premier League – the card was a fake. Mr Gates never shopped at salesgate – the name was just one of a number generated by the company to test its database.Neil Barrett, head of the security company Information Risk Management, said: “One is always careful about saying this He may be a good and competent hacker. But the hacking he was caught on was trivial and poorly executed.”Although Gray believed he was covering his tracks as he hacked his way around the internet, he had greatly overestimated his abilities. His modus operandi was to use a well-publicised flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Information Server system, which is used to run e-commerce sites all over the world. He wrote a program that flooded the website with data, making it fail – a flaw called a “buffer overflow”.He did not discover the fault – the fact had been publicised long ago in security bulletins on the internet.

However, many internet commerce companies failed to “patch” their systems to guard against this. Once he had detected them, Gray would attack and extract the credit card details from their databases.He would then exit, sure that his exploit had been unobserved.But catching him was simply a matter of reading the server logs, which indicated the time when hacks were done and from where. The trail led to an internet service provider in Britain, which could consult its own logs (after a request by the police) to see who had been logged on at that time.Catching Gray was, to any capable internet user, simply a matter of joining the dots once the server logs were available His sentence, however, irked security experts. After pleading guilty to the charges at Swansea Crown Court, Gray was given a three-year community probation order linked to treatment for a mental disorder. The judge was told that he had had low self-esteem from childhood and had received a blow on the head four years before committing the offences. The defence produced the medical evidence of his condition to explain the computer fraud he undertook.Mr Barrett, who was to have testified for the prosecution, said: “It’s getting close to the time when we need to have custodial sentences for some of these hackers.