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Mitnick Testifies on Telco's Security
Woefdram writes "Our favourite computer criminal (?) Kevin Mitnick testified in a case against Telco Sprint that their security was like Swiss cheese: full of holes. The story on SecurityFocus quotes Mitnick, saying, 'I had access to most, if not all, of the switches in Las Vegas,' and tells how he came up with a list of 100 challenge-response codes." We've written about this case before.
...is this testimony going to come back for possible charges in the future? In other words, could Sprint now decide to go after him?
No. He's already been tried for this specific crime - it would be double jeopardy. (Yes, like the movie with Ashley Judd, only with less sex appeal, since there's no women's prison involved.) You can't be tried for the same crime twice. If you commit two murders you can be tried twice, but they can't try you twice for the same murder.
What's your damage, Heather?
A quote from the article:
"With the five year statute of limitations long expired, Mitnick appeared comfortable describing with great specificity how he first gained access to Sprint's systems..."
One again, he is not working with computers at all, just recounting his experiences from 7+ years ago. And the crimes he committed then have a 5 year statute of limitations.
-- Jason
If you had read you would have noticed that he's protected by the statute of limitations. It's been over five years.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
I am a current nortel employee and I work on the DMS-100 system. Just to give you an idea of the complexity: the product's 35 million+ lines of code (in a proprietary language called protel) have been written over the past 24 years. It came out in 1976 as the first digital switch. It is old and fussy and really, really hard to improve. The legacy problem strikes again.
a.c.
First off, RTFA. Mitnick is detailing all of his Sprint Nevada exploits for the first time; why do you think they were so caught off guard? So apparently (the article itself doesn't expicitly say) this is the first time anyone's heard of Mitnick 0wning Sprint Nevada's switches back around '94. Therefore he hasn't been charged (or convicted) for these activities before, so duble jeopardy does not apply here, but due to the 5 year statute of limitations for these matters, he cannot be prosecuted anyway. HTH
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.