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

Fatuous Sexism

[nukenerd]

Anyone else find his (? Fyodor's) cringingly self-conscious use of "she" and "her" for an unknown hacker merely distracts from the story. There is now going to be more discussion of this point than the matter at issue.

In the English language, "he/his" is a neutral term in the context of an unknown person. If Fyodor were really fussy he could have used "they/their". It is not as if there were anything more than an extremely small likelyhood of the hacker being female, for various cultural reasons, nor as if malicious hacking is anything to be proud of.

Last time I heard the nonsense use of "she" in the context of an unknown malicious hacker was in some Microsoft security advice. That also caused much derision at the time, on the lines of : "So from now on guys, don't forget to lift the toilet seat".