Nmap Author Receives FBI Subpoenas

spafbnerf writes "Fyodor, author of the open-source network scanning tool Nmap, posted a story to the nmap-hackers list about having received a number of subpoenas from the FBI this year, demanding webserver log data, none of which produced anything, either because they sought old information that had already been deleted from his logs, or because the subpoenas were improperly served. In every case the request was narrowly crafted, usually directed at finding out who visited the site in a very short window of time, such as a five minute period. Fyodor writes: "If they see that an attacker ran the command "wget http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-3.77.t gz" from a compromised host, they assume that she might have obtained that URL by visiting the Nmap download page from her home computer"." Update: 11/25 20:21 GMT by T : Reader kv9 adds a link to Kevin Poulson's story at SecurityFocus.

Comments

FBI spies

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know that Google searches are subpoenable?

So Googling your victim, for example, before committing the crime is not very smart.

Unless of course you can randomly change your ip
in a pretty large range of course, heh heh.

Re:FBI spies

[MikeFM]

Smart hackers never hack from an IP traceable to them anyway. That's why unprotected WiFi points are so useful. There is no way in heaven or hell to trace the connection back to the source. Of course there are lots of places you can jack in for a unlogged wired connection too. It's just to easy to keep from being traced.

Fortunately most hackers are dumb and lazy so they aren't that hard to trace.