Philadelphia woman admits hacking Boston Phoenix personals service to harass women

A Philadelphia woman pleaded guilty today to charges she hacked into the voice-mail system used by a Phoenix personals service scores of time - and used the information to send repeated death threats to one woman in Massachusetts in particular.

Barbara Denenburg, 53, was sentenced to the 23 months she's already spent in federal prison, which means she was released, but will remain under "supervised release" for the next three years, the US Attorney's office in Boston reports.

According to an affidavit by an FBI agent, Denenburg used some social engineering and other means to get into scores of voice mailboxes on a system run by Phoenix subsidiary Tele-Publishing International in 2007. The FBI says she took advantage of a passcode recovery system that involved only punching in the person's birth date - which she was able to get during chats with users. She would then change their passwords and, sometimes, leave threatening messages. The Phoenix system is used by hundreds of newspapers across the country.

Denenburg took particular umbrage at an unidentified Massachusetts woman, to whom she sent various death threats - including a box full of sand with a replica tombstone - and whose boss and friends she called with false reports that the woman was a murderer.