[rockskon]

Unfortunately I have no source to give. The FBI employee was just giving an example of illegal behavior he knew of. He didn't cite jurisdiction or the names of people involved. Hell - even if he did, I likely wouldn't have remembered it as this was roughly 8 years ago I was in the audience for this (I know I said roughly a decade ago in my prior post - but I checked a receipt for the event and it was in 2015).

[bigiain]

Quite likely Randal Schwartz.

"In July 1995, Schwartz was prosecuted in the case of State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, which dealt with compromised computer security during his time as a system administrator for Intel. In the process of performing penetration testing, he cracked a number of passwords on Intel's systems. Schwartz was originally convicted on three felony counts, with one reduced to a misdemeanor, but on February 1, 2007, his arrest and conviction records were sealed through an official expungement, and he is legally no longer a felon." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz

[terminous]

Important aspect: he had been fired and cracked passwords while no longer an employee, to try to get rehired:

"Rather ill-advisedly, the Perl-programming guru (who's written several books on the subject) tried to prove his worth by running a password cracking package after he'd left in order to produce evidence that security practices had deteriorated since his departure. Instead of re-hiring Schwartz, as he hoped, Intel called in the police and he was charged with hacking offences."

https://www.theregister.com/2007/03/05/intel_hacker_charges_...

[fragmede]

Wikipedia is a little light on the details. How much time did he end up serving, and were there any repercussions for the other parties involved?

[vasco]

Really hard to belief without anything else to go by. This sounds like old wives tales like people that add disclaimers saying they aren't laywers when they comment on the internet because someone once told them they heard someone got in trouble.

[resonantjacket5]

Does it sound that unbelievable for the 2010s? There was quite a discrepancy between how the internet/computers were generally being used and the legality.

Like https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/ever-use-someone-elses... > Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case called United States v. Nosal, held 2-1 that using someone else’s password, even with their knowledge and permission, is a federal criminal offense.

Also, the courts only just legalized white hacking last year. Before that violating the terms of service was also potentially a federal crime. https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/security-general/news...