[lawnchair_larry]

That wasn’t quite how it went.

He initially told everyone that he was peripherally involved in writing some code as a teenager that, unbenknownst to him, ended up in some malware.

The feds unraveled his lies and showed beyond a doubt that not only did he work on that into his 20s, but he and his partner were actively involved in the business of selling a purpose-built banking trojan. They had logs of a “business dispute” between him and his parter from only 2 years prior to his arrest.

He had bad opsec, and many folks online exposed a lot of this. The feds had chat logs showing he was directly involved. It’s all in the court documents. He had no choice but to plea guilty.

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.77855/...

[sq_]

In my mind, it does count for something that he seems to have turned everything around from being a black hat towards doing proper security research and generally trying to work towards the common good.

[lawnchair_larry]

Maybe. I don’t know if I think he should be punished further or not and don’t have strong feelings on this outcome one way or another. I generally think hacking crimes are treated disproportionately harsh.

All that aside, I do not appreciate that he rallied support from the security community and raised legal defense money by convincing sympathetic folks that it was all untrue and he was being set up, when he was actually guilty the whole time.

Manipulate the legal system all you want for all I care, but manipulating good natured people in the community who put their own reputation and money on the line is not exactly a class act. I didn’t give him money, but I did fall for his original story.