Business in brief

Judge cuts United's debt obligation to Chicago's O'Hare\nCHICAGO -- A bankruptcy judge approved a deal Tuesday, dramatically reducing how much of O'Hare International Airport's debt United Airlines must pay.\nThe deal, reached earlier with bondholders, will save United about $450 million and help the nation's No. 2 carrier emerge from bankruptcy, United spokesman Jeff Green said. It slashes United's obligation to pay $600 million of O'Hare's debt by 75 percent.\nThe debt is from bonds the Chicago airport sold to United to fund construction projects specifically for the airline, Green said. United has not made any payments on that debt since December 2002, when it filed for bankruptcy.\n"Obviously, we are looking to cut our costs in any way we can," Green said.\nUnited, a unit of Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based UAL Corp., hopes to reach similar agreements with airports in New York, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles, he said.\nUnited said Monday it had received four offers of debt financing worth as much as $2.5 billion to help the airline exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy.\nUnited did not say which financial institutions had made the offers, and there was no schedule for when any final deal might be reached.\nData collection firm warns Californians of hacker attacks\nSAN FRANCISCO -- A company that collects consumer data warned thousands of Californians that hackers penetrated the company's computer network and may have stolen credit reports, Social Security numbers and other sensitive information.\nChoicePoint Inc., which sells such data to government agencies and a variety of companies, acknowledged Tuesday that several hackers broke into its computer database and purloined data from as many as 35,000 Californians.\nLast fall, hackers apparently used stolen identities to create what appeared to be legitimate businesses seeking ChoicePoint accounts, said Chuck Jones, a spokesman for the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company. They opened about 50 accounts.\nThe attack appears to have resulted in at least six cases of identity theft in Los Angeles County. It's unclear whether data of people outside California were exposed. But law enforcement agents, who have arrested one person on six counts of theft, say hundreds of thousands of Americans elsewhere may be at risk.\nChoicePoint has not notified consumers in other states, nor is it working with law enforcement agents elsewhere, Jones said.\n"California is the focus of the investigation and we don't have any evidence to indicate at this point that the situation has spread beyond California," Jones said. "If at some point in time we get information that it's in other areas, we'll revisit the disclosure."\nSecurity experts dismissed the notion that hackers would limit their attack geographically.\n"I've never heard of a hacker doing something just to make a company comply with a state statute -- that's ridiculous," said Nick Akerman, partner and co-chair of the computer fraud division of law firm Dorsey & Whitney. "It'd be like robbing a bank that wasn't FDIC insured so the robber wouldn't have to be prosecuted by the FBI."\nChoicePoint sent e-mail notifications to Californians last week. State residents were the only Americans notified because the state has a unique law requiring companies that do business with residents to warn them when they've had holes in corporate computer networks.