> A legitimate researcher should be notifying the company that they are going to be looking for vulnerabilities in the first place. That is part of the distinction in behavior that I am encouraging. This way if someone is caught poking around for things to abuse unsolicited, at least there's a little more merit to holding them accountable. We are able to treat it more like the threat it is.
The issue is this. You have some amateur, some hobbyist, who knows enough to spot a vulnerability, but isn't a professional security researcher and isn't a lawyer. They say "that's weird, there's no way...," so they attempt the exploit on a lark, and it works.
This person is not a dangerous felon and should not be facing felony charges. They deserve a slap on the wrist. More importantly, they shouldn't look up the penalty for what they've already done after the fact, find that their best course of action is to shut up and hope nobody noticed, and then not report the vulnerability.
The concern that we will have trouble distinguishing this person from a nefarious evildoer is kind of quaint. First, because this kind of poking around is not rare. As soon as you connect a server to the internet, there are immediately attempts to exploit it, continuously, forever.
But the malicious attacks are predominantly from outside of the United States. This is not a field where deterring the offenders through criminal penalties is an effective strategy. They're not in your jurisdiction. So we can safely err on the side of not punishing people who aren't committing some kind of overt independent crime, because we can't be relying on the penalty's deterrent regardless. We need the systems to be secure.
Conversely, if one of the baddies gets in and they are in your jurisdiction, you're not going to have trouble finding some other law to charge them with. Your server will be hosting somebody's dark web casino or fraudulent charges will show up on your customers' credit cards and the perpetrators can be charged with that even "unauthorized computer trespass" was a minor misdemeanor.