Slashdot Mirror
Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding"
innocent_white_lamb writes "In what appears to be a more-and-more common occurrence, Ahmed Al-Khabez has been expelled from Dawson College in Montreal after he discovered a flaw in the software that the college (and apparently all other colleges across Quebec) uses to track student information. His original intention was to write a mobile app to allow students to access their college account more easily, but during the development of his app he discovered 'sloppy coding' that would allow anyone to access all of the information that the system contains about any student. He was initially ordered to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating that he would never talk about the flaw that he discovered, and he was expelled from the college shortly afterward."
All problems can be solved by personally punishing someone in an unrelated fashion to their crime, rather than simply fixing the problem.
...and report on exactly how this flaw works, and what its implications are.
The college system turned a friend or at least a neutral party into an enemy. They should expect any and all damage that he can inflict on the administrators at the top that were foolish enough to support the actions taken against the student.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected.
Seriously, don't run Acunetix or Retina scans or whatever on other people's systems. It looks like you are probing for vulnerabilities because, well, that's exactly what it's doing.
And if I'm a sys-admin, I'm going to see that and think you're an attacker. From my point of view, you've just cased the joint. That's what I'm going to report up, and from there everything gets ugly.
I know, this is slashdot, but i still read the article
And i still don't agree with him getting expelled, but the reason was not discovering/disclosing the flaw, but he got in hot water when afterwards he tested if the flaw was still there, and the company developing the software reported the hacking attempt.
It was still a big overreaction that happened afterwards, and he shouldn't have been expelled, but it's not the discovering/reporting of the flaw that got him in trouble, and the article clearly states this!
In trouble for finding sloppy coding?
What'd he do, boot a Windows computer?
Aren't there laws which invalidate contracts signed under duress anyway? I thought I remembered reading that somewhere.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Techs everywhere need to learn this important lesson: Never Sign Anything unless you are also offered on the same piece of paper a guarantee of you what you receive in return. You get no prize money for signing NDA or DNC. If you ask for it, you will get 1) a job, 2) some cash, 3) some action not taken. You can ask for nothing, but you will get the exact opposite - penalized or harmed. Your goal is to sign something such that if what you are offered is not fulfilled, the NDA is broken
As it stands, asking someone to sign a NDA and not offering a guarantee of something in return is already suspect and can be fought. You had an expectation that you wouldn't get expelled, or that you would get a free education, or something else of benefit to you. People need to learn that colleges, Lance Armstrongs and corporations all act the same way. You will get screwed if and when there is an opportunity to screw you. And you will go broke defending what is right. Few will care.
Don't Sign without Something in Return (DSSR)!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I missed that part of the article. Can you quote the line where they said that?
It seemed more like he discovered a flaw and reported it. This embarrassed the university. He later tried to verify if the flaw had been fixed by using the flaw (probably not the best move he could have made) and the university used this as an excuse to terminate him.
Sure, nevermind all those other unrelated innocents who'd get their information stolen in consequence.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You do assume that this is going to be fought fairly. The legal system is a game of adversaries - and the objective of the college administration was not to fight a fair legal battle, but to win at all costs. If I were a bastard in their place, I'd see an obvious way to prevent him doing that: "You want a lawyer? Go ahead. But the moment you step out of this office, I'm calling the police. Either sign the NDA right now, I'll make sure you really do need that lawyer."
It's intimidation, of course. But most of the time I'd expect it to work. What's the worst that could happen? A college student finding enough money to file a civil suit against the college, that could take years to complete and cost more than he'll earn in a decade? No, most people would recognise that they are being strong-armed, but also that they are being strong-armed by someone with both the willingness and ability to utterly screw up their life if they don't comply... regardless of the fine points of contract law.
Sure, nevermind all those other unrelated innocents who'd get their information stolen in consequence.
Also, stop misusing that damn phrase, asshole.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why would you run a vulnerability scanner software on a remote network from your home ip!?. Sounds to be like he found a flaw, and got overzealous and got permbanned.
I heard about this on the radio this morning. This is not the full story.
Supposedly he reported the flaw to the school and was thanked and told it would be taken care of. Later (not sure how long he waited), he decided to test to see if the flaw was fixed, at which point the CEO/owner of the software company called him directly and told him he could be arrested and asked/forced him to sign the NDA. It was only after that, that he was expelled.
It also seems this flaw is in the software itself and would have affected more that just this particular school.
Any way you look at it, it's very ugly.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Slashdot article summary is very misleading at best. He was not expelled because he reported a security flaw, he was expelled because he ran Acunetix a website vulnerability scanner after he reported the vulnerability without permission of the web gods. Although no malicious intent by Ahmed Al-Khabaz, he stepped over the line and the University was not in a forgiving mood,
arguably vindictive.
Taza explained that he was quite pleased with the work the two students did identifying problems, but the testing software Mr. Al-Khabaz ran to verify the system was fixed crossed a line.
“This type of software should never be used without prior permission of the system administrator, because it can cause a system to crash. He [Al-Khabaz] should have known better than to use it without permission, but it is very clear to me that there was no malicious intent. He simply made a mistake.”
For reporting the vulnerability in the first place, he was thanked by the University, but they did not take kindly to using Acunetix -- I would certainly agree that the university over-reacted, but they were not punishing him for discovering a vulnerability.
Just because he had an Islamic name
What's "Islamic" about the name? If you said "Arabic", now that would be something else...
Ezekiel 23:20
Calling a kid an idiot is a bit strong. He's only 20. It was only a few years ago that the biggest threat from an authority figure was that something he'd done might appear on his "permanent record." Nice to see another country that doesn't educate it's citizens on their rights.
I'd be amazed if there isn't a lawyer who won't take this up pro bono and sue the school.
By the story linked, he wasn't expelled for finding a software flaw, he was expelled for running a vulnerability scanner against their network.
Everything with finding the flaw seems to have gone find. He found the flaw while working to develope an app, he did nothing wrong, and it seems like he got kudos for it, not any sort of harrassment at all.
Then he started using a vulnerability scanner on their network. You never do this without an arrangement (IE a pen testing contract). Never ever ever. It's illegal for one, it definitely can disrupt systems, and it sends up all kinds of red flags.
On the other hand, no one told me those things in college; they were part of my job training post-college. When I was at school, there were no 'ethical hacking' classes that let you know what is and is not illegal to do as part of vulnerability research. So I doubt very much the kid had any idea what was going wrong. Hell, I know now that most big universities get crazy-angry if you do anything that even looks like an attack over them... but no one told me that in college when I was actually using those networks.
The company took a rather strong wording but soft action: they elected not to pursue anything past getting him to sign an NDA. They didn't ask the school to expell him, the school did that entirely on their own. The student clearly doesn't understand why he was expelled, either. At least not by his quotes in the story (he's sure it's trying to cover up the flaws; in reality it's almost certainly because he ran what is considered a cyber attack across a university network, very illegal and very likely to piss off the administration).
Obviously he shouldn't have been expelled; he did not act with malice, and clearly still doesn't know the legal boundaries. What this tells me is it's long past time to start coupling your computer science 101 class with a cyber ethics and law 101 class. While anyone who works for a pen testing company can immediately see where things went bad, his actions make perfect sense from the perspective of a college student.
When I was a CS student I discovered a flaw in the program we used to turn in assignments. The flaw allowed access to the code anyone had turned in for an assignment. I however elected to anonymously inform the CS dept about the problem. Glad I did. I found out they searched and searched trying to figure out who I was so they could kick me out. Sometimes it is better just to be an Anonymous Coward.
Is there a reason you're so angry at someone who's never done anything to harm you?
I don't know if you're a lawyer, and I don't know if you've ever dealt with clients who have been bullied into signing things. I am, and I have. Your fantasy version of the perfectly rational college student making calm and collected decisions when he's being threatened with prison, from people who are his authority figures and who he assumed were there to help protect him, is ludicrous.
This disclosure won't affect whether a court ultimately determines that the contract was signed under duress. And now that there is going to be some extremely hostile press against the company (I hope), such a lawsuit may never materialize. In which case breaking the agreement may have been the smart thing to do.
Since the security flaw left personal data of all students including himself out in the open, I'd say he had every right to see if the company patched the hole yet. One might even say it was his duty to check. This was just 2 days after he reported the hack, but does shooting the messenger imply that they worry more about their reputation than the actual security flaw? Especially since the student took pains to report the issue rather than exploit or publish it. For once I'd like to see trigger-happy software companies and institutions like these hauled before court on charges of gross negligence, undue duress, and leaking of personal info.
I wonder why the school decided to expel him. The software company overreacted a bit when they found out; perhaps they sent a note to the school to the effect of "We found that student of yours hacking around in our system again; we've told him we'll call the cops if he keeps doing it". I can see why the school would expel him on the strength of that.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Wow ... you seem to be lacking some basic empathy skills. Do you have any idea what it is like to be squeezed by some institutional power for no other reason than doing the right thing? It's brutal enough to be squeezed when you have some experience under your belt, but this kid was only twenty years old.
Now, let's say he finds himself in the same position a few years down the road and he repeats his actions, expecting a different result. Then, I'd call him an idiot. In this case, I call him exactly as he was: a student. It was a shitty lesson, but that's the point of college. It's not to get a job or join some pro football team. It's to learn and he learned by fire.
Once man's "hack" is another man's Quality Assurance.
There are a lot of innocent bystanders here. Someone has chosen to be their champion in this thread already. Those bystanders are just as much as risk even if he takes the easy path and keeps his mouth shut
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What an unpleasant person you come across as. It must be nice to live in a brain that can have no empathy for other people, and can dismiss their mistakes because they're an 'idiot'. Not having to deal with trivial emotions like sympathy or concern.
It's good for you that when you became 18 or 16 (in your examples) you knew everything about your rights and could effectively counter any bullying tactics. Sadly the rest of us are not so fortunate, and when threatened by a older more experienced people in authority tend to doubt our poor, meagre minds.
Or of course, they could have just gone to him, showing their own proof that they had indeed fixed the problem. Thanked him again for not exploiting the weakness in their system and understanding that students trying to learn, be constructive and help others access information easier are the kind you want in your University. Everything after whether correct or incorrect, is understandable coming from a colleague student. People make mistakes. When the College did it, they were given a second chance, because of this guy. When he then made a mistake, no such option was granted. He's better off without the college, and at least he will have learnt a few things. It's all just a shame really.
...when I read the title. I'm from Montreal, currently studying on exchange overseas. A few months back a friend of mine was telling me about an app him and some friends in a club at Dawson College were writing. I know a few of the guys personally because I was at some party with them back in September and I had heard a bit about how the project was going in the months following. All this to say, the story is complete bullshit.
Apparently, the school had originally offered to share some info that would help the guys making the app, but, coincidentally some company started developing something around the same time that was along the same lines so Dawson reneged on the deal. FTA:
Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson and a member of the school’s software development club, was working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account when he and a colleague discovered what he describes as “sloppy coding” in the widely used Omnivox software
The story goes, according to my friend, as such. Apparently, the programmer and one of the other guys decided they were just going to take the info, which was easy to do since Omnivox is such a terrible system, by breaking in. While doing this, they discovered the flaw and used it as leverage once the school noticed they had accessed the system and approached them. The other friend played innocent and the programmer got the flak for it, eventually being expelled.
This was by no means a white hacking deal. Also, these guys have been exploiting Dawson's system for a while to print for free and other such things.
It's interesting how many articles like this we get on slashdot. Just makes me wonder how easy it is to skew a story a certain way regarding a subject like programming which so many people know nothing about. If they found something, what were they doing looking in the first place? Well, sometimes people are just dicking around or curiously looking at how bad a system is, but sometimes they are - like in this case - breaking in to steal specific information for personal gain.
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected. A few minutes later, the phone rang in the home he shares with his parents.
So he reports a flaw in the software and then two days later IT detects a possible surface attack on the website which turns out to be him using software that finds other exploits. Seems to me like the student is a moron.
Sorry dude welcome to the real world of consequence.
Here is the relevant section of the article;
After an initial meeting with Director of Information Services and Technology François Paradis on Oct. 24, where Mr. Paradis congratulated Mr. Al-Khabaz and colleague Ovidiu Mija for their work and promised that he and Skytech, the makers of Omnivox, would fix the problem immediately, things started to go downhill.
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected. A few minutes later, the phone rang in the home he shares with his parents.
“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack. I apologized, repeatedly, and explained that I was one of the people who discovered the vulnerability earlier that week and was just testing to make sure it was fixed. He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didn’t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement.”
Note that jail was only mentioned after Acunetix was run.
They are not innocent if they are funding a corrupt administration.
By this logic, no taxpayer in history was ever an 'innocent'.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly the argument that just about every terrorist/freedom fighter in the world falls back on when targeting civilians.
By not co-ordinating his follow-up testing with anyone (the vendor, the school, etc.) he was caught exploiting a known weakness in the software.
He had no responsibility or right to attack the software a second time, call it "testing" if you like, he choose to attack the software using the exact same exploit he warned them about earlier.
It wasn't his job to "test" their fix.
14 out of 15 professors choose to expel this student - a student who claims to have been "acing all his classes" - there just might be more to the story than this student is sharing with the reporter...
Ken
He waited two days.
He coordinated with no one, he just decided to run a piece of scanner software against someone else's servers and got caught.
When his case was reviewed byhis college, despite no formal charges being brought against him he was expelled by a vote of 14 out 15 professors in his own department (where he was "acing all his classes").
I seriously suspect there is more to this story than is being reported... These professors that knew him voted him out of the school.
Ken
Honest! I was just trying to make this mobile app so I had to hack into your system and I found this sloppy code that let me in!
What part of "Do not access things you are not authorized to access" do these people not understand?
If you stumble onto a defect in an information system while developing an application front-end to that system, there is no unauthorised access. The level of intelligence on /. has decreased significantly from the early days. Mores the pity.
The rule here is to never sign NDA in this case. Go public and burn the company in question with the media. Threatening people with jail when they discover a exploit in software is counter-active and just plain stupid. The president of Skytech clearly doesn't understand software or computers in general. In fact. I am sure that he is just plain capital asshole as you can find them in companies everywhere.
If a vulnerability scan crashes a system then there really is sloppy coding.
Anonymous could stop DDoS attacks and instead just run a couple of vulnerability scans to take down their opponents. So much easier!
Even though I'm not a security researcher, I have in a distant past stumbled onto security flaws while trying to interface with something. The claim is entirely plausible. You might want to stop taking these pills you're talking about; they obviously don't help.