Report Security Problems, Face The Consequences

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Doing a good deed has caused one man a lot of trouble in the past year. Brian K. West, a tech support junky in a SE. Oklahoman ISP is now facing felony charges due to alerting his competition about a serious security flaw in their systems. The full story can be found at LinuxFreak.org ... I find this rather disturbing that our federal government would do such a thing to someone.." The details of the story lead to some head-scratching.

Comments

Interesting Tactic

[zpengo]

Competition: "Oh, there is? Really? How does it...? Oh, geez that's really bad. It does that too!? You're joking? Wow, we'll get on that right away." (Hangs up phone and calls police.)

PHB: "Good work, Johnson! That'll show 'em!"

Naked Woman Seeks Sex at Airport

He's a witch...

[doorbot.com]

...burn him!

Re:Who-hoo! Land of the Free!

[Anonymous Coward]

And fortunately for you, one of the few that won't kill you for criticizing it.

The DMCA strikes again!

[tangent3]

I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure that 'violating the DMCA' will eventually come up as the charge.

Common Sense and Peeping Toms

[Gefiltefish]

While this individual seems to have done a "good deed" in communicating a security flaw and this pursuit by the feds is excessive, the issue should at least get a fair treatment from both ends. Just imagine the following coversation:

Concerned Citizen: "Mr. Smith, I'm calling because I noticed that your bedroom blinds are partially open and I can see your wife walking around in the nude. I thought I'd bring this to your attention so you can remedy the situation before more malicious sorts exploit the breach in your window dressings."

Smith:"Are you sure about this?"

Concerned Citizen: "Yes sir. Just to be sure, I pulled out my binoculars. I can tell you that your wife has a pierced left nipple and a tattoo of Bugs Bunny on her right butt cheek. Oh, and I'm sorry about your lack of gift. They say that size really doesn't matter anyway..."

Smith: You bastard!!

What about MS?

[multicsfan]

Shouldn't MS be a co-defendent as they provided the software used to 'hack' the site? Isn't there something illegal about making tools that are used for 'hacking'?

Re:Important lesson

[jimmyphysics]

Nah, just mention it in #h4k3rz or something. Let the problem work itself out.

Re:yeah

[jjsjeff]

I'll do you a good deed by teaching you how to spell DEED.

Re:Similar experience, but with a happy ending.

[GlassUser]

Wanna hear something even worse? At a small ISP I used to work at, they had some ass of a lady doing server configs who left backdoors all over the place. One guy hosting in Virginia got spammed from out of my ISP's users. He telnetted to our mail server to see if it was a system he knew, if you could get anon access to it, etc. Anon login didn't work, so he was going to exit. He fat-fingered the telnet control command, and was still on the host when he typed "exit". The prompt then read "password>" and by reflex he typed "exit" again. It then gave him a root prompt. He called up and got me, told me what he did, and said I should fix it. You should have seen the owner's face when he heard about it. Oddly, though, his reaction was to beat the crap out of our server operator, not sue the guy that told us about the hole.

Dee Em See Ay

[Frodo]

Sure, oh yes. Site's content is obviously a copyrighted material, and site's defences are to protect this material. Which makes Microsoft a company that produces technology and tools to circumvent the copyright protection. I'm holding my breath to see Ballmer arrested by FBI agents next time he goes out of Microsoft headquarters.