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Australian Teen Reports SQL Injection Vulnerability, Company Calls Police
FuzzNugget writes with an excerpt from Wired, which brings us the latest in security researcher witch hunts: "Joshua Rogers, a 16-year-old in the state of Victoria, found a basic security hole that allowed him to access a database containing sensitive information for about 600,000 public transport users who made purchases through the Metlink web site run by the Transport Department. It was the primary site for information about train, tram and bus timetables. The database contained the full names, addresses, home and mobile phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and a nine-digit extract of credit card numbers used at the site, according to The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Rogers says he contacted the site after Christmas to report the vulnerability but never got a response. After waiting two weeks, he contacted the newspaper to report the problem. When The Age called the Transportation Department for comment, it reported Rogers to the police.'"
The article says he was reported to police, but not arrested or even contacted by the police.
He only even knows he was reported to the police because the journalist told him.
Seriously, can we at least read the article before making up wrong headlines?
From the article:
"Update 1.9.14: Rogers confirmed to WIRED that the vulnerability he found was a SQL-injection vulnerability. He says the police have not contacted him and that he only learned he’d been reported to the police from the journalist who wrote the story for The Age."
He hasn't been arrested.
Whoever posted this should be deleted from /. No where does it say dude was arrested. Learn to read or go back to reddit.
This sentence is quite incomplete.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
No. Education is too expensive. Just replace him with a monkey.
... and gets arrested.
2. "leak" the info to some hacking circle and let others do the job for you.
Brilliant, help the kids remove any hope they had for a slap on the wrist by making them a coconspirators in a criminal enterprise.
If you want to learn to be a security researcher then find some like minded folks and practice on each other's systems. Create Windows, Linux and *BSD honeypots that are misconfigured, not currently patched, etc. Watch your friends try to get in. It will be an educational experience from both the offensive and the defensive perspectives.
If you're not browsing by proxy in this day and age, you're screwed.
But baby, proxies don't feel natural! I'll pull out before I post my comment, I promise.
He has not yet been arrested and Metlink were simply following their IRP for a security breach which doesn't discriminate based on intent.
No. This is simply wrong. If "Metlink were simply following their IRP" then they would have started investigating and taking action last month when their gaping security violation was first reported.
Instead they did nothing until exposure of their incompetence was threatened by mainstream media.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
To hide from the law, he changed his name to Drop Table All.
Table-ized A.I.
Wow, I hope you never have a complaint to report to the Complaint Department! Word to the wise: the Complaint Department doesn't exist. You will be arrested.
I'm pretty sure most western countries have a complaints department for law enforcement.
Many years ago in my teenage years in New Zealand, I was chatting to random people on IRC (a pretty new protocol at the time) and there was a guy bragging about bombing a plane - specifically, putting explosives on the landing gear of the plane.
Being young and paranoid, but not yet particularly clever in the ways of the computer security world, I 'anonymously' emailed the police with information about it. My attempts at anonymity were however not good enough and a few days later the police came and took all my computer equipment. The search warrant read "Attempted murder and breach of the telecommunications act" (I still have it, along with the write up I got in the newspaper as a reminder of absurdity). Of course, I was never arrested as I had done nothing illegal.
While that all annoyed me greatly, it didn't annoy me nearly as much as them keeping my stuff for over 3 months before I got it back. When I did finally get it back, the power switch on my main system was physically broken and the HDD was formatted.
I made a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority (a government body) and they ended up writing a letter of apology. So, while complaining certainly didn't do anything useful for me, the point is that there WAS a body for me to complain to.
I'm sure it's a little more complex in countries like the US and Australia since there may be differences by state as well as the federal level to think about, but a quick Google search seems to confirm that complaints departments and/or processes do exist there also.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Joshua Rogers here. The kid that this article is about.
I want to clear something up..
I have _not_ been arrested(yet).
I have _not_ been questioned(yet).
I have _not_ been officially told that I've been reported to the police(yet).
I'm completly in the blank, as much as the rest of you. .. .... ........
What I'm expecting to happen:
They show up at my doorstep asking questions.
That's it.
They might ask me to sign something that says I have deleted all the data that I saw.
If you have any questions, I can be contacted @megamansec..