From: Art Cooper (acooper@pop.innerwall.com)
Date: Thu May 11 2006 - 11:25:57 EDT
I agree Bill. The fact they use information HE provided to then convict him
is completely ridiculous..
On Wed, 10 May 2006 09:20:22 -0500, William Hancock wrote
> Hey there pen-testers, take this with a grain of salt, it just got me
> excited. I am really interested in everyones opinion on the matter
> or corporate responsibility and ownership.
>
> <RANT>
> In an article posted to slashdot today
>
> (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/112259&from=rss) a
> man has been convicted of hacking when he casually and helpfully
> reported a security vulnerability to the owners of a web site, in
> this case The University of Southern California. It reads like it
> was some sort of simple SQL injection and upon gleaning the
> information he reported it.
>
> What are we to do as a community I ask? We should we, the good guys,
> who are paid for our knowledge and ability to exploit mistakes,
> oversights, and weaknesses then professionally report them to aid in
> the securing of information capital (or anyone who reports the flaw
> for that matter) worry about prosecution. It lends itself to a
> forcing the technical community to sit on their laurels and wait for
> the people who don't report issues to exploit them. Further it
> sounds very clear that had he not notified them, they would have
> never known.
>
> A security pro notices a flaw, checks to make sure he is not on
> crack by 'flipping a bit', deems the threat viable and is likely to
> be exploited, notifies the owners, then get arrested and charged
> with unauthorized access. We, as a or even The security community,
> should push corporations, governments, and organized body's to take
> responsibility and ownership of their problems. If they publish a
> site that is flawed or exposing information then they are
> authorizing the retrieval of that information. I'm not advocating
> that they laws should allow any jerk to try and brute his or her way
> in to a public or private web site, but come on.
>
> If someone leaves their wallet in the park with no guard or
> protection, I pick it up and bring it back to the owner, the owner
> didn't want me to have it but I brought it back to him. Why in the
> hell should I have to go to jail for returning it to him, why should
> I/we be punished for doing the right thing?
>
> I acknowledge this to be a rant but there must but some way to insist
> that when people make something available to the public that it is their
> responsibility to safeguard it and appreciate not persecute someone who
> let's them know (for free I might add) that a weakness exists. This
> is simple scapegoating, the University did something not advisable
> as a good practice and instead of owning up to it they villafied a
> professional pen-tester for offering valid advice.
>
> </RANT>
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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