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Adrian Lamo Surrenders
clafarge writes "Three days after
Adrian Lamo was charged with hacking, he surrendered himself to marshals at the federal courthouse in Sacramento. This according to a story on the AP's LiveWire. He's accused of causing 'more than $25K damage to New York Times Co.,' and performing LexisNexis searches on his own name to the tune of $300K! I always find it interesting that so little tinkering can cause so much 'damage' (if you didn't get that wink, read the article about the nature of the 'damage'). He's in his parents' custody on $250K bail."
webmaven
adds links to the same AP article carried by Wired, InfoWorld, and C|Net, and points out that more coverage can be found via Google News.
He writes: "Adrian negotiated the terms of his surrender, which included the charges in the warrant issued against him being disclosed."
If someone hacks a site, and it goes down for a day. That business loses thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus a hit to their reputation. That IS damage, and should be punished.
But I think they're being a little loose with the word damage here. Lost revenue cannot be revenue that you didn't get, that you never would have gotten.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I'm getting a little tired of the apologists for this guy saying that he did nothing wrong, he tried to help, and he did no damage.
If the sysadmin is aware of any unauthorized intrusion, he or she would be utterly incompetent to take the cracker's word for it that no damage was caused. Evaluating the integrity of the system is time consuming and causes major problems for the users.
Our e-mail server was once hacked -- the hacker caused no damage, but we were without e-mail for several days while our sysadmin made sure we were okay.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Well, he apparently told them how to fix it
If somebody hacked into one of my machines and then told me how to fix it, I'm afraid I'd be just the *teeniest* bit reluctant to take what they said at face value.
As a result, at the very least you've got to expect the NY Times had to pay for a forensic analysis of the network and a total rebuild of any compromised systems.
Would that cost $25,000? I dunno. It doesn't sound completely outlandish to me but I don't know anything about the NY times's systems.