When Lowe's doors are unlocked you may enter the store without fear of getting thrown in jail or prison for criminal trespassing.

The Lowe's wireless network was unlocked. There weren't any security measures in place to prevent someone from just waltzing in.

This boy who is 19 years old will now be transformed into a hardened criminal by prison life for a crime that in effect cost Lowe's nothing.

By nothing I mean they should have already factored into their budget security measures to protect their customers important information. Whether they did this before or after this kid broke in doesn't matter. The money should have been spent in the first place.

It is not this boys fault that they had to spend money to secure their network. The damages they said were incurred are completely imaginary and should not have been made the basis for judgement.

The actual value of the credit limits on each card should have been added up to produce the true amount of damages that could have been caused.

First of all we might assume that the cards used were business credit cards. If you wanted to look and see what the average credit limit of a business credit card is you would look here: BusinessCreditCards

Ok, now we know that the average maximimum limit on a business credit card is around $50,000 so...

Let's see if my grade school math still works.

6 credit cards @ $50,000 = $300,000

Although it is still grounds for a felony, it is a far cry from Lowe's estimated $2.5 million in damages. My guess is that Lowe's used the imaginary loss to receive some sort of insurance settlement.

So Lowe's gets the $2.5 million in insurance money and this kid gets stuck with 9 years in prison.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/10138/29723#29723