http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/whitehat-hacker-goes-too-far-gets-raided-by-fbi-tells-all/
By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
April 9, 2014
A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to
drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client.
Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit.
David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software
consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he
claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to
gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his
employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the
vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than
300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers.
As Helkowski said to a co-worker in Steam chat, “I got tired of being
ignored, so I forced their hand.” He penetrated the university’s network
from home, working over multiple VPNs, and downloaded the personal data of
members of the university’s security task force. He then posted the data
to Pastebin and e-mailed the members of the task force anonymously on
March 15.
One day later, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Helkowski’s home.
While no charges have yet been filed against him, Helkowski’s employment
with Canton Group has ended. And yesterday, he took to reddit to tell
everyone about it in a post entitled “IamA Hacker who was Raided by the
FBI and Secret Service AMAA!” To prove his identity, he even posted a
redacted copy of the search warrant he was served.
How did the FBI track him down so fast? It turns out that Helkowski told
just about everyone (including co-workers) about what he was doing. And
since the vulnerability he used was the same one Canton Group had reported
to UMD on February 27, it didn’t take a lot of sleuthing to follow a trail
that pointed straight back to Helkowski’s home in the Baltimore suburb of
Parkville.
[...]
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