If You Hack NBC, You Don't Get to Meet Tom Brokaw

subgeek writes "Security Focus Online is carrying this story about the spot that Adrian Lamo almost had on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. NBC changed their mind after they realized the possible legal implications of filming someone hack corporate systems. NBC also seemed a bit touchy that Lamo had gotten into their system so handily. According to the article, it took him about five minutes and one guessed password to get inside NBC's intranet from a computer at a Kinko's. Lamo's comment: "It was a very full service system.""

Comments

So... what was the password?

[taeric]

So, if this guy was able to guess someones password, I am VERY curious as to what it was. If you know anything about the person, it makes guessing easier. However, if you don't know even the owner of the account, how do you guess a good password?

My only hunch is that the password was something like 'abc123'. It cracks me up how many people have passwords such as that and are supposedly worried about security.

It is also funny to hear what some of my friends think are secure passwords. Among them being obscure Anime characters.

This remind me of similar case in Finland

[jukal]

one guy (I worked with him in same company for some time) broke to a governmental system in Finland in a TV show, don't remember the year, maybe it was around 1985, anyway he was maybe 16 then - just old enough to be prosecuted properly.

His identity was kept secret in the TV show, but a few days after, the TV station was forced by police to reveal the identity of the guy to get him convicted. The incident got a lot of media coverage, because before that many or most had thought press has the right to protect their "sources" and do not need to reveal details about individuals.

Anyway, maybe in this Lamo case, it is more about "agitating someone to do a crime", the court might see for example that part of the motivation for breaking in some system could be the fact that he would get press coverage and fame because of it - and NBC would be to blame for agitating.... or something totally different :)

Lamo is my hero

[zaren]

He got into Worldcom's systems while I was working there, and it threw the entire company for a loop - out of the blue, passwords were expired en mass on various portions of the network, and a weak VPN software package was crammed down the throats of the Windows users. Thousands of people had to get it installed, and ALL of the registration and training and configurations had to be handled through a VERY small pipe. That was an interesting time... good thing I wasn't one of the people that had to rely on the VPN software to do my job.