Eighteen months for 'White Hat' Hacker

Eighteen months for 'White Hat' Hacker
Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2001-05-21

Cyber security expert and former FBI undercover operative 'Max Vision' to surrender in June.

best of a bad lot 2001-05-22
thor3gen

My sympathies are with Mr. Butler. If he meant by his comments about "being caught up" that he felt he didn't have the time to rewrite the worm I wonder why he didn't specifically say that.

As for the FBI's behavior...nothing like being on the loaded end of self-righteous authorities.

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Max Vision as the fall guy 2001-05-22
Robert Yelvington (1 replies)

How about a little perspective. Max's sentence was almost twice as long as a person convicted of an armed robbery! We should all be outraged at this. How many corporate System Admins use whitehats.com to assist in protecting their corporation's valuable computer assests? In that respect, Max you...

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Max Vision as the fall guy 2001-05-24
Max Vision

Thank you for your words of support. Unfortunately, since I did not actually have a trial, my fate was decided by a presentence report (quite an evil document that is supposed to be objective, but may as well have been written by the prosecution) and a single, bored Judge who mentioned that he was ...

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Whose side are they on? 2001-05-23
Chris Talianek

Whose side is the FBI on? By jailing Max, the FBI is taking a big bite out of corporate security. Chalk one up for the bad guys. Thanks alot, FooBarInc....

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Sad Episode 2001-05-23
red5torm (1 replies)

I guess after this sad episode many white hat hackers would get a perspective on how the FBI moves. Max should have been given a slight reprimand instead of putting him in jail. White hats would be wary on the FBI's invitation for them to join their team. White hats would think twice.

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Internet marshal 2001-05-23
donald smith

What max did was illegal and even he admits that it was wrong. On the other hand he has provided a great service to the internet community.

Perhaps whitehats should push for formal premission to allow people like max and the cheese worm author to penetrate to close holes. Intent is generally a majo...

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He's low... 2001-05-23
old hat

All this White Hat/Black Hat talk has these guys sounding like Dungeon and Dragons nerds. I guess we need better classifications like Neutral-Evil Baseball Caps and Lawful-Good Sombreros. I think I?m wearing a Chaotic-Neutral Fedora. Somebody stop me!

How about the life and family of those he inf...

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sick of the sympathy 2001-05-23
mike c (1 replies)

"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime."

I doubt his intent was purely good samaritan - he left a back door. Also, to continue the earler guys's analogy, you don't fix your neighbor's garage by installing your own security system without telling him - you notify him of the problem.

Thi...

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RE: sick of the sympathy 2001-05-23
seph

true, he did invade systems without notifying the sysadmins, but lets not loose perspective here. i've seen drug dealers at my school get lighter sentancing than he did. if you consider all his contributions to the hacker community and weigh that against his crime, his sentance is BS. there isn't re...

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