Ethical hacker faces war driving charges

[Tedob1]

Nth Man, he wasn't trying to help the county, he was trying to further his career by calling a press conference and showing how good he was. Problem was, he broke into it ten days earlier to be sure that he could, probably using knowledge he gained while working their. He must have thought he was to good to be found out.

5k dollars is not hard to figure out, after a break in I imaging some high priced security specialists were called in, spent hours auditing every file to see if they’ve been accessed and altered in some way, people had to stop working while the were checking the files. These people who had to stop working still get paid. So that’s counted as a loss, which it is.

This guy isn’t a white-hat, hes just some self serving ass-hole who got caught.

[DukArchon]

Ok, so maybe my one question is who does the testing for government systems? The citizens who it is meant to work for, or the people who run it and have the least to lose if it found insecure?
A good case in point:

A person who works for a company probes it, finds numerous problems with it's info-tech systems, reports it, and gets fired.

A person who works in gov't, probes a gov't system, and then reports it, and then gets a disciplinary action for it.

So, who's responsibility is it, the admin, who don't know their a** from a hole in the ground(Not all admins are like this, I'm not labeling all of them this way), or a security consious person who happens to not work for the IT department?

[Tedob1]

true wht happen to government site does affect us all, in some way and if you wanted to look out for your interests, there's always the anonymous phone call DukArchon. too many people use this like blackmail, to try to get jobs, promotions even laptops.

[lobstermagnet]

As far as gov. puters go the Admins there are the worst in the business. Often they are put in the network admin job cause tehy are usless everywhere else. I have report numerous problems with our local network and been repremanded for "looking where I shouldn't be" on numerous ocassions. Just my two cents worth but I don't think its worth trying to help anyone solve their obvious sercurity holes unless asked to and this is coming from someone who had to learn the hard way.

[The Old Man]

Maybe the bottom line on this subject, whether we like it or not, is something like; everyone has a job to do. Most of those jobs have a chain of command, and somewhere up the line a very sensitive high-ranking supervisor who sits at the round table each morning for the CEO's briefing. If the (military here) IT Colonel gets a case of the a$$ from some dude in the cooks galley who happens to be a clever system type who hacks the system and brags about it, you can bet the Col. will get the first and last shot off and the hacker will learn what a general court martial is. Change that military Col. to a county commissioner in charge of whatever-system-gets-whacked, and you can bet he'll be at the prosecutor's office in ten minutes flat, screaming for the warrant to be hand-carried to the judge by the sheriff who will be required to make an arrest before the ink is dry on the paper. Some things are as constant as day and night.... and self-preservation techniques by the top cat in any organization are somewhere up around the top of the list. Anyway, most of us have noticed something like that.