51–60 of 99 posts
How f-ed would he be if he flew to the US?
That's easy to know, just look up "Xbox Underground" and you'll know what happens when you get caught by the FBI accessing video games developers networks and leaking games: Short version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Underground Long version: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/ In short they got sentenced to 18 to 24 months of prison.
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That used to be a running joke within the original hacker (NOT startup-hacker) community
When I was in high school, in the Before Times[1], a guy who ran in my hacker circles broke into the school system's mainframe and gave everyone he liked straight A's. He was, of course, caught -- but the school system really did hire him after he graduated, as their IT security guy. [1] This was before the internet, before there were laws specifically about this sort of thing, and before the public started mistakenl…
Gaining illicit access to systems lost the appeal when I realized they’d just grant the access if they trusted you not to screw it up. That was the end of my hacking and beginning of my career.
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He did so to confess. He has admitted he didn’t want to hide. There’s no strategy to critique here; he wanted to come clean.
I'm guessing he got a better deal than if he had been caught
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The justice department has absurd ways of determining how much damages were caused by unauthorized access. Kevin Mitnick talks about it in his book "Ghost in the Wires", but he was accused of causing $1.5mil in damages to DEC or Sun or something because he copied code, printed it out on paper, and kept it for himself (he didn't distribute it to anyone else). Fortunately, he was ultimately only ordered to pay a few th…
Not that I can speak for this specific story, as I have no firsthand testimony, but Mitnick is a notorious embellisher, downplayer and (anecdotally) liar.
The article claims/repeats the claim that this cost valve $250 million, but I don't see how. If the leaked version wasn't very playable the damage can't come from lost sales
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That used to be a running joke within the original hacker (NOT startup-hacker) community
When I was in high school, in the Before Times[1], a guy who ran in my hacker circles broke into the school system's mainframe and gave everyone he liked straight A's. He was, of course, caught -- but the school system really did hire him after he graduated, as their IT security guy. [1] This was before the internet, before there were laws specifically about this sort of thing, and before the public started mistakenl…
I thought it'd be an interesting entry into tech jobs, specifically around microsoft AD, which was something I never got to really play with enough at home (licensing, and hardware limitations)
They ended up just using me to re-image and setup machines :(
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Pretty sure the leak also lead them to release the Source engine's code, which was wildly successful.
Valve has not released the source engine code beyond their partners.
>"Have you any idea how lucky you are that we got to you before you got on that plane?" That's the most important thing I took away from this article. The kid did something stupid and it almost ruined his life because he almost got onto a plane that would have taken him to the FBI & US justice system. Instead local authorities got a hold of him and he learned a vocation waiting for a trial (programming) & having show…
Everytime this pops up, it always reminds me about the cafe program which just had MAC authentication. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-hacker-arrested