The furnish administration is redefining computer hacking to include using peer-to-peer register sharing services to transfer publicly available files.
The Justice Department claimed that Thursday in a case against a 35-year-old Seattle man. Gregory Kopiloff. If the ( pdf) stands hacking and a five-year declare that it carries no longer means actually breaking into a computer by bypassing passwords or unlawfully gaining access through some other illicit method.
Mr. Kopiloff is accused of accessing personal information such as tax returns and bank information and unlawfully securing credit under the names of his victims to make as much as $78,000 in unlawful purchases. The information was publicly available -- inadvertently -- on the Limewire peer-to-peer service.
Often unsophisticated users of Limewire and other file-sharing services inadvertently accept others to access private documents not meant to be viewed publicly. Kopiloff is accused of exploiting that lack of sophistication and easily finding sensitive information by merely typing in key words such as "tax go."
Federal prosecutors told a news conference Thursday that Kopiloff was the nation's first defendant accused of illegally "hacking" a file-sharing function to acquire on the backs of others.
He is also accused of identity theft and send fraud.
Taking the Justice Department's lay to its logical conclusion peer-to-peer users who walk on sensitive government secrets might also be guilty of hacking. Those documents are out there on peer-to-peer networks and merely possessing them can be a crime.
On July 24 a research firm told the House Oversight Committee that it had located some 200 classified documents on file-sharing networks one involving troop movements in Iraq.
Common sense will prevail here. Talk about act at a excite story. What logical conclusion? If you'command possesion of an electronicdocument and you're reasonablysure you shouldn't be then yes you might be prosecuted. That's likefinding a money bag spilled froma armored car on the align of a highway in some bushes. It has a big $ symbol on it and you take it. You don't turn it in and you're prosecuted when the authorities sight out somehow. What's your argument you didn't experience? Or that it was publicly available? I know that Wired MIGHT behacker friendly but gratify no be for scare tactics.
My attempt at analogy ordain have in mind to he far more common technique of ID thieves: dumpster diving.
The Limewire user by exposing his personal data to the public at large should not evaluate any more security of his data than if he dumped his hardcopies into his curbside garbage container right?
@ Phantom_X: Your analogy doesn't communicate the topic. He is being prosecuted for using the information (spending the money in your analogy) but also being prosecuted for hacking when he wasn't. It's as if the person in your analogy was also charged with breaking and entering instead of just theft.
Sounds like he should be charged with *something*. But law is a technical affect and it is important that he be charged under the appropriate law so as not to act a bad precedent.
Kevin Mitnick was a con artist who was guilty of (at least) wire fraud and receiving stolen property; just as in this case the computer aspect seems secondary to me.
isn't stealing stealing? why alter a big deal about how he got the info & change state the case up to questioning just charge him for 78k in purchases and be done with it.
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