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Consultant Convicted For Non-Invasive Site Access
Phillip P Barnett writes "Security consultant Daniel Cuthbert worried that he'd been stung by a phishing scam when he donated to a Tsunami relief effort in London, UK. He was convicted for hacking and lost his job after running a couple of checks on the website in question." From the article: "During the trial, Cuthbert's defence argued that any unauthorised access was entirely innocent. In evidence it was shown that he had attempted to access the tsunami donations site on two occasions and the site's security systems had denied him access. The defence also pointed out that Cuthbert had not attempted to defraud the site." ZDNet also has a commentary piece on what this decision may mean for the future of cybercrime.
By the way, the first thing that (superficially) struck me about the story was the guy's name:
D an i e l Cuth bert
Have you read my blog lately?
So, he breaks into a manor occupied by bikers who are also judges, and is surprised that he is prosecuted onsite?
However, we still don't have any laws against trolling. Shame, really...
Now that he's beginning his new career as a black hat...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I hoped after all this he asked for his donation back.
Nyquil = Nectar of the devil
If he was B&Eing into a biker hangout to see if they had his stolen TV, he'd be prosecuted in the exact same manor.
You're telling me that the U.K. police beat him, killed him, and buried him in a shallow grave? Just for trying to hack in some charity site a couple of times?
Man, I though they were harsh on people who run in the subway!
You can't take the sky from me...
Aren't we supposed to assume innocence before guilt?
Oh, wait, you're posting as AC...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
It is a shame that no one has posted what the acutal lie was. Or was it a changing story?
1st interview:
cops - what did you do?
guy - I looked around the site to see if it was legit
2nd interview:
cops - what did you do?
guy - Well I fired up my Ultra 60 running Solaris, not that it had ZFS, but I started her up anyway. I was going to use mozilla/mozilla, but I forgot that I had acidentally removed an X lib earlier that year when I was testing a buffer exploit. So I dug up an old copy of lynx that I had cobbled together with color-xterm support. I remembered that I had not compiled it with SSL, so I had to rebuild it with with and openSSL library. I then typed "../" on the end of the URL.
Judge - you changed your story! Liar liar pants on fire.
Boss - your fired!