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Zoombombing is a crime, not a prank, prosecutors warn
- jamisteven 7y agoLMAO, right. Lets see them catch the people doing this. Laughable at best.
- nieve 7y agoZoom has account & ip information and most of these people aren't going to be using a real vpn. It's probably easier to track them than swatting calls going to voice services.
- gerland 7y agoI'm pretty sure that pretty much all of the people doing that will be using vpns. I mean come on, vpns are one of the most known services on the internet. In the wake of shadowbaning, global silencing by social networks and being penalized on the basis of anything that deviates at least a bit from the norm, anybody who wants to speak like a normal person on the internet has to use a vpn. You can bet that whoever goes way beyond what is considered normal on Zoom will be using a vpn.
- javagram 7y agoMany people zoombombing are likely kids who don’t know any better, their OpSec is probably pretty poor.
- gruez 7y agoGreat, so you scoop up a bunch of 12 year-olds who don't know any better and send them to juvie. Sounds like a net positive on society. /s
- brazzy 7y agoNobody's yet proposed any concrete sentencing, and that is something the courts have a lot of leeway in, especially with 12 year olds. Given reasonable handling (i.e. no actual prison sentences): yes, it does indeed sound like a net positive on society if a bunch of 12 year-olds learns to know better that stupid shit can have real, serious consequences.
- gerland 7y agoOr society can learn that a 12yo has a very poor judgement and treat seriously the thing that actually matters - that most people have no knowledge or common sense with regards to security. If a 12yo can distrupt your corporate meeting, then IMHO the problem is not that underage kids are prone to stupid pranks. This is nothing else than an outlash by people who feel humiliated. Maybe, just maybe, they should feels stupid for a bit.
- makerofspoons 7y agoVery likely kids. I've been seeing tons of links to meetings with passwords being dropped into Discord chats asking for someone to bomb it at a certain time. While certainly there are some sophisticated bombers out there, it seems like there are quite a few who are just classmates wanting to disrupt classes.
- donatj 7y ago> Zoombombing isn't a harmless prank; it's a crime. These are by no definition mutually exclusive, unless you’re considering the harm of over litigious prosecutors on society.
- non-entity 7y ago> disrupting a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud, or transmitting threatening communications Uhh majority of those seem highly dependent and mostly disconnected from the actual zoomboming act and moreso with what you do once you're in the session. Also, I'm not sure offhand what all entail "computer intrusion", but from my brief reading here[0], it seems that they must he stretching the definitions. Are you really "hacking" if you just join a meeting that someone posted openly on reddit, inviting others to troll? On the other hand, I've heard of people being prosecuted successfully for typing /../ in a URL or something along those lines. Not defending people who do it, at least not on principle, but I'm just wary of the application of those laws. Out of all of them the first is the only that makes any sense, but zoom meetings are public now? [0]https://www.wklaw.com/computer-intrusion-under-federal-law/ https://www.wklaw.com/computer-intrusion-under-federal-law/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- belltaco 7y agoIt's all about intent, not about how you did something or what. >you just join a meeting that someone posted openly on reddit, inviting others to troll? If you joined the meeting with the full knowledge and intention of trolling yes, that falls under statute. What that other person did doesn't really matter in your prosecution, he might be prosecuted as an accessory to your crime, but his actions don't provide you enough defensive cover. What you're stating is like a gun murderer saying "I only pulled a lever, which billions of people do every day". If someone posted a deep URL to a hospital oxygen system inviting reddit to troll, and you go there with the knowledge and intention to troll, and press the off switch and kill a bunch of people, you're going to be prosecuted for their deaths. "I just clicked a button lol" isn't a good defense and will probably just make the judge and jury think even worse of you. Same with typing /../, you're trying to access hidden and potentially protected sensitive information. It's like trying the handles of the cars parked on the road.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoIf cost_of_quality < cost_of_lobbyism_for_punishment do spend_more_on_lobbyism() end
- LinuxBender 7y agoThis is an interesting topic. If I equate this to the physical world, would this be similar to a public town meeting being held with no security and no locked doors, then a protester walks in and starts protesting? What are the protestors typically charged with successfully? This also reminds me of Gary McKinnon who logged into NASA windows servers as Administrator with a null password and no firewall. [1] He was looking for proof of UFO's. Point being, there was no security on the systems and so Gary basically walked in as a guest. No hacking required. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/25/gary-mckinnon-extradition-pink-floyd-hacker-us https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/25/gary-mckinnon-ext...
- elicash 7y agoIsn't it more like a private meeting, say, in your house that has a door that's unlocked? I personally dislike applying digital settings to real-world, but if you're going to make a comparison these aren't for the public or on public property.
- zajio1am 7y agoPrivate homes have special protection (and would be more analogous to private computers). This is more like invading rented lounge/room in a pub.
- runawaybottle 7y agoFor a lot of kids, this is the same as ringing a door bell and running with your friends. Honestly if I were a kid today I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to troll our remote class meetings with my friends.
- brink 7y agoI got a felony (which was later dropped) pressed against me for something like this. Changed my highschool's website to a rickroll, ended up in cuffs.
- Craighead 7y agoThats not the same thing at all. You probably violated usc 1030 b-e
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoSo how did you do it?
- brink 7y agoThe system admins used the same password for everything. We ran the windows password file against a rainbow table. Once we figured out the password and that it worked on the admin portal to the website, we couldn't resist for the laughs.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoLOL I don't blame you! Nice work! Sounds like you were a bright, bored kid! What are you doing these days?
- brink 7y agoThanks! Still a hacker. Mainly JS, React, Rails, and Flutter these days. :)
- 7y ago
- CivBase 7y agoThis rings as an especially empty threat. Even with account data and IP addresses, it would be costly and time consuming for the police to track down and charge the "zoombombers" - even if all the attackers were part of their jurisdiction. Their effort would be better spent recommending alternative services or providing guidance for how to configure private Zoom calls.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoThey only need a couple dozen well-publicized arrests and prosecutions to deter 99% of the trend.
- laughingbovine 7y agoYes, thankfully we don't have online drug sellers or ransomware hackers anymore. Arrested a couple and all the online crime stopped.
- Slikey 7y agoA security concept so vulnerable to this should be the real crime. Kids like to troll, this has always been the case and will always be the case. I am quite annoyed the internet culture is more and more invaded by these lawyers. The internet has always and should always be built on the concept that whatever can be exploited will be and the people who open themself to exploits carry the majority of blame. Maybe that's just my wishful thinking for a more wild west anarchistic internet...
- alharith 7y agoSo you wish that the digital world, a place where the majority of the youth are spending an ever-increasing amount of their time, to be subject to a culture we wouldn't tolerate in the physical world? Perhaps first define an internally consistent worldview. The reality is the internet isn't this blank space for hackers experimentation and exploitation anymore (used to be one of those kids by the way). It's becoming more and more integral to people's lives. It can cause real harm to people. It can even cause the loss of life. These things need to be taken seriously much more so than our childish notions of some anarchistic society of hackers and trolls doing as they please. Save that for the playgrounds and the skateparks. The real world works differently.
- zeepzeep 7y agoIf you leave a door open in the "physical world", someone will enter. If you have easy to exploit vulns, you'll be exploited. I tolerate that logic in the real life. Ofc the people who enter are bad, but there will always be bad people, so you're to blame for not protecting against them.
- Veen 7y agoThat is true, but it is also true that people are rightly punished for doing so.
- prophesi 7y agoWhen it comes to technology, I trust NP-hard problems much more than any government's court system. Rooms are password-protected by default. If it must be public, enable the waiting room feature (though there are currently undisclosed zero-day's for it).
- emilfihlman 7y agoHere we see out of touch people supporting actions that can destroy lives, for no benefit.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoKey quote: "Zoombombers have exposed themselves to schoolchildren and shouted racial slurs." Kinda knocks down the "hacker kids having harmless fun" image in my book.
- laughingbovine 7y agoI don't understand why people are comparing this to realspace crimes. I get that we have plenty of laws covering them, but the online world is completely different. It's possible for people to commit cybercrime and still be undetected. How can you arrest someone if you can't find them? The internet is still very much the wild west, and it needs to be treated as such, with lots of locks and keys. Doing anything less is negligence.