A better analogy would be that they go out and pick locks on other people's houses or cars, but then instead of stealing anything, they hang a big sign on the door saying "Company X builds sh*tty locks, see?"
I'll be the first one to admit, the companies whose executives use their first names as passwords deserve to be publically embarrassed when they determine security policies and methods without knowing anything about the subject, but even the more benign hackers are not exactly Consumer Reports. They do not "buy" the locks, they test other people's.
The most disturbing thing about the two stories is the fact that the U.S. Attorney wonk they interviewed basically implied that the richer the person you mess with, the more serious the crime: "If you deface a Web site of a company that is making $18 million dollars a day, you are committing a pretty serious crime," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Yarbrough
Slashdot Mirror
A better analogy would be that they go out and pick locks on other people's houses or cars, but then instead of stealing anything, they hang a big sign on the door saying "Company X builds sh*tty locks, see?"
I'll be the first one to admit, the companies whose executives use their first names as passwords deserve to be publically embarrassed when they determine security policies and methods without knowing anything about the subject, but even the more benign hackers are not exactly Consumer Reports. They do not "buy" the locks, they test other people's.
The most disturbing thing about the two stories is the fact that the U.S. Attorney wonk they interviewed basically implied that the richer the person you mess with, the more serious the crime: "If you deface a Web site of a company that is making $18 million dollars a day, you are committing a pretty serious crime," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Yarbrough