In this day and age, no government computer system is completely safe from attack. And those attacks can come from anywhere--from foreign nations engaged in espionage, to some hacker-whiz kid seeking a challenge.

Ordinarily, hackers are not caught. But that is not the case for Philip Gabriel Pettersson, a Swedish computer hacker who broke into the networks of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA) and Cisco Systems five years ago, and last week was indicted for those acts.

Operating under the name Stakkato, Pettersson was 16-years-old when he broke into the computer systems in 2004. Now he faces a five-count indictment for illegally damaging computer networks and theft of trade secrets.

The indictment said Pettersson compromised NASA's Advanced Supercomputing division and the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, known as NASA's computer-research nerve center.

For more on this break-in:
- see this Wall Street Journal article