Point Out A Vulnerability, Go To Jail

from the it's-the-American-way dept

A computer security analyst in Houston who simply pointed out that the wireless LAN of the county distric clerk’s office was insecure, has been indicted for computer fraud. The district clerk is claiming the “intrusion” cost them $5,000 to clean up. Ok, let’s get this straight: if I set up a completely insecure network, and someone points that out to me, and it costs me some money to fix my own stupid setup, I can send the guy to jail and have him fined hundreds of thousands of dollars?!? Time to reconfigure my wireless router to make it a bit less secure. Come hack away!


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Comments on “Point Out A Vulnerability, Go To Jail”

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5 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Balmber vs. the guy on the street

hop on over to netstumbler.com and you’ll see two headlines:

One about this guy and another in which Steve Ballmer self-confeses to WLAN Jacking (and in fact there’s some question as to just how many of the microsoft muckety-mucks “conspired” to Jack this lamers WAP).

The point of the matter is WLAN jacking is painlessly easy to do with XP and that engauging LEO (law enforcement officials) is a particularly dangerous thing to do (just say “No!”).

The guy in the article got what he deserved and if the WAP owner (who’s SSID was “Mountaineer”) or his bandwidth provider doesn’t pursue Microsoft for theft of service, then they’re just plain stupid.

Remember kiddies, you never know when microsoft personnel are going to be in town, jacking your precious internet bandwidth (mental note to route non-IP Microsoft endpoints to /dev/null)

Randy Davis says:

Pointing out a problem...

If someone did not point out the WLAN security problem, would they be helping the (alledged)terrorists ?
And possibly risk being jailed/find for that ?

Ahh….
If there were only more “perfect” people that did NOT have the urge to carry rocks and look for glass houses.

1) Mind Your Own Business…
2) Treat others at least as nice you would like to be treated…
3) If your are going to act like a arsehole, expect to see a a lot of crap

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