A few regulars on The Wolf Web website easily cracked the N.C. State Public Safety police blotter website and posted bogus entries, much like they did for News-14‘s site during last winter’s snowstorm.
While breaking into computers is wrong, the perpetrators thought it was a harmless prank, and in my view it was. The kids got unspecified charges, but the cops should also charge themselves with failure to secure one’s computers by picking the easily-guessable password of “PSDblotter.”
Duh! Can you say “entrapment?” You might as well leave the bank vault door wide open with a welcome mat in front of it.
I don’t think this action merits jail time. Let’s hope the campus police department comes to their senses and moves on to more important matters, like directing traffic at university sporting events.
From Merriam-Webster Online:
entrapment – the action of luring an individual into committing a crime in order to prosecute the person for it.
If I leave my door closed but unlocked, that isn’t an open excuse for anyone and everyone to walk into my house. At the very least, it qualifies as trespassing, even if you just looked around.
Let’s put the blame where it belongs. Those guys weren’t lured into hacking that computer. It’s not like the computer sat on the Internet broadcasting packets saying “I have piss-poor security!” Unauthorized access of a computer system has been a crime in North Carolina for many years now.
You and I both know that someone doesn’t accidentally log in to a strange computer, especially when it requires a login name and password. They didn’t have permission to use that computer, and they knew it. What they did was the computer equivalent of spraypainting boxcars, and they got caught.
That being said, the police are highly overreacting in this case. Since those guys did it as a prank and didn’t cause any harm, they should get fitting punishment, like 40 hours of community service picking up trash on the roadside. And the person responsible for the security of that computer should be reprimanded and/or demoted.
Thanks Mark. The sadest thing about all of this is, the lives that will be ruined simply because the State Campus Police got their feelings hurt over a harmless prank. These young men do not belong in jail. They should have jobs in big companies keeping the real “hackers” out. A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste. Those kids have GREAT Minds.
Actually NC State law defines entrapment as “planting the seed in the mind of the accused to do something he would not normally do”. So hacking an easily hacked website doesn’t qualify here.
Perhaps not legally it doesn’t, but an argument could be made that the kids were performing a public service to the police in revealing to them their security flaws.
What if the criminal records database suffers from the same lackadasical security attitude? Imagine the damaging information contained in it! The campus police should truly thank these kids for showing them the need for information security.
In fact, if I were captain of the force, I would be reprimanding those in charge of the site. It makes me angry that potentially harmful information could be so carelessly protected.
The police have only themselves to blame.