4 ms·
This may be unrelated, but one of the things I've always thought is that contests, bug bounties, and things like it kind of give a free pass to hacking attempts
by diminoten 13y ago
This may be unrelated, but one of the things I've always thought is that contests, bug bounties, and things like it kind of give a free pass to hacking attempts, don't they?
Is this a well-understood part of these kinds of programs? Even the ones that say "color inside these lines" can be used to say, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know I was outside of the boundaries" if a person ever gets caught trying to get into a bad place.
So you've got all kinds of logs of me trying to break into your system, but as long as I fail I can just pretend like I was going after the bounty you've placed, right?
- mattlutze 13y agoExcept that, if you're going after the bounty, you'll have read the rules, which define the particular attempts you're making as out of bounds, i.e., still malicious. I'm trying, but failing, to find a recent article about a guy who found a password in a dropbox for another company that had a "hack us" contest, and subsequently was indirectly accused of potentially illegal conduct (they settled on sending him a shirt instead of money).
- anonymouscowar1 13y agoIt wasn't a hack us contest, just a bug bounty that applied to a limited number of domains (not including whatever site the dropbox password went to). That's what I remember, anyway.
- diminoten 13y agoThat's my point though, he certainly didn't go to jail, did he? These are still new enough that a person could mask any legitimate hacking attempts in the guise of "I didn't know I couldn't do that". So you get to be as malicious as you'd like, and no one's going to come after you, lest an Internet mob forms or something.