8 months for this? I thought that was the average length of a sentence given to murderers in the UK.
"White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
21–30 of 120 posts
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#22> "He added that when Mangham was arrested he made "copious" admissions to police about what he had done."
Given the chance, I always bang the "don't talk to authorities" drum. So now you have to wonder, how did his "copious admissions" help him? Seriously, if you are suspected of anything, no matter how innocuous or momentous: Shut. The. Hell. Up. Get a damned attorney.
Of course the classic video needs to be linked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#23Is it possible to be a "white hat" hacker if you weren't actually contracted by the target for penetration testing?
There is obviously a spectrum to this sort of thing, but I know of many people that will just habitually enter javascript alerts into a web services's forms to see what happens.
Mostly this is just to evaluate the product and to see if it is trustworthy, but they'll often send along a polite FYI to the site owners letting them know if they have security issues that need addressing.
Actions like that: finding vulnerabilities, privately disclosing them, not disrupting the service, are all fairly innocuous things that most reasonable technically savvy people would consider 'white hat'.
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#24"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," he said. This is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil.
While it is indeed despicable to imagine that there's a different law for big and small companies, it is long known that the size of actual and potential harm is considered when crime and punishment is being discussed. One would probably get different punishment for stealing $10 and stealing $100K (though if you manage to steal $100M you may actually get away with it, but that's another story). If his lawyer would ar…
You can't compare this to $10 vs. $100000K because the actual damage done here versus him doing the same thing to the servers of a small company is not x10000 the size, if that makes sense. The harm caused in both cases is negligible.
I suppose you could count the large amount of time facebook probably had to spend going through their systems to make sure they were clean. Surely the money for their security team was already spent though?
Also, isn't messing around with the records of a small business somewhere that probably doesn't even have proper backups actually more potentially damaging than poking at part of a globally distributed, multiply redundant decentralised system like facebook?
It was really the way the judge chose to phrase that whole bit that annoyed me to be honest.
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#25Seems ridiculous for a company who has the word "HACK" all over the inside and outside of their office, to put energy into this. Hire the kid and move on.
It really depends on the intent and extent of the intrusion, which I don't know. If there was no malicious intent and nothing was irreparably damaged, I'd say yeah, hire him. Even Microsoft, when WP7 was jailbroken, hired the hackers and put them on their openness team. The end result so far is that Microsoft allows "developer unlocks" for non-developers, so sideloading is possible.
You'd think tech companies would have learned something from all the retribution the cracker community has laid down in the past few years. If you have security holes, own up to them and fix them. Hire real security teams and have external pen-testing on outward-facing products. And if, after all that, you get breeched still... at least learn something from the attack, and possibly from the attacker.
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#26> "He added that when Mangham was arrested he made "copious" admissions to police about what he had done." Given the chance, I always bang the "don't talk to authorities" drum. So now you have to wonder, how did his "copious admissions" help him? Seriously, if you are suspected of anything , no matter how innocuous or momentous: Shut. The. Hell. Up. Get a damned attorney. Of course the classic video needs to be linke…
Upvoted. Never, ever, talk to the cops.
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#27So, what did he break?
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#28"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," he said. This is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil.
That's just giving an impulse to black hat hackers: "Hey, if they still punish us (although we just wanted to show them weaknesses) at least let's give them hell!"
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#29"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," he said. This is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil.
This is the kind of attitude that makes me pissed as well. It's like the phrase too big to fail. Big doesn't equal important.
Rest assured hackers are seeing these cases and acting accordingly. When the sentence for curiosity is comparable to malicious deeds, then the incentive is obvious. You have successfully incentivised hackers to make sure that their deeds are so great that their sentences actually come close to representing them.
Re: "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail
#30"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," he said. This is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil.
I can spare my karma and you can downvote me now for saying this (but my blood is boiling too), but I can bet you my left arm (I'm left-handed) that if that "international business" called Facebook would go down for longer than 25 minutes, you would see world's work-power suddenly increased by 40%.