8 ms·

Georgia Tech Student Indicted in UGA Hack

• krambs 12y ago
  I suppose this is the 21st century equivalent of TPing houses or stealing the mascot. Unfortunately for this dude it's also a felony, apparently. (Though I have to imagine they will let him plead to something lesser.)
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • yourad_io 12y ago
    > I suppose this is the 21st century equivalent of TPing houses or stealing the mascot. Though, literally speaking, both of these require more cleanup than this "hack". TP-ing requires someone to clean up, and stealing the mascot requires investigation+recovery, or re-issuing. This is e-graffiti prosecuted as cyber-war/terror/...
• sciurus 12y ago
  Here's the coverage as the story developed over the last two months: http://onlineathens.com/sports/college-sports/2014-11-28/uga-website-hacked-pro-georgia-tech-sentiments http://onlineathens.com/sports/college-sports/2014-11-28/uga... http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2014-12-03/uga-continuing-probe-hacking-schools-main-website http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2014-12-03/uga-continuing... http://onlineathens.com/sports/college-sports/2014-12-30/georgia-tech-student-indicted-uga-website-hack http://onlineathens.com/sports/college-sports/2014-12-30/geo... http://onlineathens.com/uga/2015-01-02/crowdfunding-cover-uga-hackers-legal-fees http://onlineathens.com/uga/2015-01-02/crowdfunding-cover-ug...
• NN88 12y ago
  How'd he get caught?
• deleted 12y ago
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• Xcelerate 12y ago
  It's kind of ridiculous. He only posted a silly little phrase on their website. I do not support crimes of any sort, but much like illegally downloading music, selecting particular people to make "examples" of with over-the-top punishments is immoral. The punishment does not fit the crime here at all. On another note, as a GT alumni, I find his prank absolutely hilarious. There is also a tradition at Georgia Tech of stealing a "T" off the top of the main administration building. These "T"s are massive; I believe they weigh close to 200 pounds. How anyone manages to scale a building and pull one down is beyond me. Especially with all the pressure sensitive equipment they have up there nowadays. The tradition is supposedly banned since someone can get hurt, but a guy managed to pull it off last year, and the whole school thought it was fantastic.
  • rjbwork 12y ago
    Hell, as a Georgia Alumni, I think it's hilarious! I'm surprised a GT student was so careless TBH. Tor + an anonymous proxy if you're gonna be futzing around in someone else's network, even if you don't intend to cause any tangible damage!
    • lloyddobbler 12y ago
      Interestingly enough, it may not even have been as complicated as that. According to one Reddit commenter, the UGA calendar is left wide open for submissions - and in some cases, posts may be under minimal (if any) review. So it may be that he simply found the wide open URL, filled out a form, and hit 'submit'. http://www.reddit.com/r/gatech/comments/2quflw/georgia_tech_student_indicted_for_uga_website_hack/cna5jjz http://www.reddit.com/r/gatech/comments/2quflw/georgia_tech_... Seems like that would be fair game without using Tor or some other proxy - since there are no terms or conditions of use mentioned on the form, seems like it's open to anyone to post. But who's to say?
      • CodeWriter23 12y ago
        So UGA's theory is he was trespassing because that wide open system is only intended for use by UGA Students, Faculty, etc? Seems flimsy to me.
• j2kun 12y ago
  I suppose that's the priority as far as indictment goes in this country.
• brador 12y ago
  Did he simply log in with another users password he guessed/found/user failed to log out or did he hack the server? In my opinion, a) is not a serious crime, b) is.
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  • eli 12y ago
    Why is hacking a server worse than stealing a password?
    • brador 12y ago
      Then it becomes premeditated and with intent.
      • iamcreasy 12y ago
        Why abusing the other user space can't be premeditated?
    • sliverstorm 12y ago
      We could try to draw parallels to physical law. Hacking = breaking and entering Sitting down at someone's logged-in computer = unlawful entry (not forceful entry)
      • eli 12y ago
        Sitting at someone else's terminal makes it sound like a crime of opportunity, but why is stealing a password through spearphishing different from bypassing a poorly coded authentication token?
        • sliverstorm 12y ago
          Is that what he did? There is obviously a very large spectrum of how you could obtain a password, of varying degrees of "ethical". I have to ask you to be specific which you want to talk about.
• ajju 12y ago
  Here is a defense fund for him: http://www.gofundme.com/ji4xh4 http://www.gofundme.com/ji4xh4 All proceeds not used go to UGA and GT equally (disclaimer: I went to GT and think this is a ridiculous indictment but am not affiliated with the gofundme site or Ryan)
  • EpicDavi 12y ago
    Some of the comments on that gofundme are horrid. Some include laughing at and taunting him, saying that he deserved it.
    • beedogs 12y ago
      There are a lot of horrible, unthinking, authoritarian people out there who think folks need to be punished well out of proportion to their crime in order to "teach them a lesson".
• deleted 12y ago
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• CodeWriter23 12y ago
  I remember when I was a kid, Caltech students would occasionally hack the scoreboard during The Rose Bowl to change the team names to "Caltech" and "MIT". People would laugh. The thought of an arrest never occurred to anyone.
  • stdgy 12y ago
    The CalTech and MIT pranks are legendary, and generally go well above and beyond what was demonstrated in this situation. The prosecution of this 'offense' is simply absurd.
    • CodeWriter23 12y ago
      One of my favorites, there once was a bank called Union Bank in Pasadena. It had a big neon sign that read "UNION BANK" at the top of their building. Apparently a Caltech student was up in one of the unlocked maintenance rooms and figured out the nine giant switches correlated to the letters and changed the sign to read "ION BAN". Nihilism in its purest form.
    • NickNameNick 12y ago
      There's a pretty good archive of MIT pranks at http://hacks.mit.edu/by_year/ http://hacks.mit.edu/by_year/
• siegecraft 12y ago
  This crime is about as serious as 1. walk into a building on campus that anyone could walk into since it's not a closed campus 2. write your message on a whiteboard calendar. Not even a permanent calendar, since the calendar is digital, it can be erased as easily as a whiteboard.
• rayiner 12y ago
  Word of warning: Georgia has harsh and poorly-written criminal laws. I'm a Georgia Tech alum, but I'm glad I got out of that state: http://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-9/article-6/part-1/16-9-93 http://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-9/.... The definition of "computer trespass" isn't unreasonable. It should be illegal to break into a site and deface it, just as it should be illegal to walk into someone's house and put up a poster. People need to respect boundaries. What's insane is that there's no gradations based on the seriousness of the conduct. Any crime punishable by a year or more in prison is a felony, and "computer trespass" is punishable by up to 15, even if the sentence is ultimately a slap on the wrist. In contrast, the meat-space equivalent of criminal trespass is a misdemeanor as long as any property damage is under $500: http://law.onecle.com/georgia/16/16-7-21.html http://law.onecle.com/georgia/16/16-7-21.html. For more serious property damage, there is a separate statute, with different degrees of severity.
  • boracay 12y ago
    We'll have stupid laws as long as people who doesn't understand technology continue with those stupid analogy. Guess what, maybe defacing a calendar in the digital world is quite similar to, wait for it, defacing a calendar in the real world. No one is walking into anyone's home.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      Tech people think the problem is analogizing to the real world, because they see computer crimes as less serious than meat-space ones. But ordinary people see computer crimes as worse than analogous meat-space ones. The analogizing helps, not hurts. If you walked into someone's office (and a server can easily be as sensitive as someone's office or someone's desk), and just defaced their calendar, you'd be hit with a misdemeanor, under the corresponding Georgia law.
      • deleted 12y ago
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  • waterlesscloud 12y ago
• iamcreasy 12y ago
  Is there any details about how he did it?
• mcmancini 12y ago
  Is this actually only about the calendar entry, or is there more to the complaint? From a separate article at Online Athens (http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2014-12-03/uga-continuing-probe-hacking-schools-main-website http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2014-12-03/uga-continuing...): >Elsewhere in UGA’s digital realm last week, the career center was hacked with fake Internet addresses. The Internet address walmartacademy.com directed people to the University of Georgia’s main website, and the address ugagrads.com directed people to McDonald’s online career page.
  • aaronharnly 12y ago
    I couldn't find much other coverage of it, but from this other article[1], it really does look like the other "hack" consisted of buying some domain names and posting them to Twitter. [1] http://m.bleacherreport.com/articles/2282874-georgia-tech-fans-hack-uga-website-update-team-schedule-with-a-kicking http://m.bleacherreport.com/articles/2282874-georgia-tech-fa...
    • loarabia 12y ago
      Looking at the whois for ugagrads.com its not the same person and already existed. So he didn't even buy them.
  • lloyddobbler 12y ago
    Ah, yes. The sinister "buy-a-domain-name-and-301-redirect-it" hack. Cybercriminality at its finest. I'm so glad that "UGA is taking these hacks seriously."
• lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  I can't believe some of the comments I'm reading here on hacker news in response to this. Yeah, society would have been much better off with the likes of Robert Morris Jr, Steve Wozniak, and Richard Feynman behind bars. We should not tolerate such criminals. Be careful who you erase from history over something so damned ridiculous. Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/gba.html http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
• yourad_io 12y ago
  I'm reminded of this[1], that I dug up from my threads here on HN: > This sad, sick notion that hackers are terrorist enemy #1 and this is the most important thing governments should be working on is, like this movie will probably be, shitty fiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by Hollywood in movies like War Games that make it look like we're all going to be nuked thousands of times if we don't stop the Hacker menace. Help me change the media's perception of hacking before we start throwing more whistleblowers and e-graffiti artists in prison. "e-graffiti artists" resonated with me as a phrase, and I think this is exactly such a case. I hope his prosecutors do their jobs within reason[2]... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8776527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8776527 [2] Unlike, say, Aaron's :/
• niels_olson 12y ago
  When I was a freshman at the Naval Academy, for Army-Navy week, we got access to the Pentagon and posted xeroxed Go Navy Beat Army signs all over the place. My buddy and I posted them square on the huge Army emblem outside the Chief of Staff's office. We slipped them under doors with big combo locks on them, which in retrospect probably led to quite a few SCIFs. We probably walked every ring and level before we hailed a security guard to find our way out. His eyes were big as saucers and he said "The Secretary said you're not supposed to be here." Turns out we were the last ones out by quite a bit. The Superintendent made it the centerpiece of the Pep rally the next night: "You know, admirals don't generally like to get phone calls from SecDef in the middle of the night, but what am I going to say? Go Navy, Sir!" I wonder what would happen today?
• cafard 12y ago
  There is or was a patch on the University of Denver's University Hall, said to derive from a long-ago football rivalry with Colorado School of Mines. Students of mining engineering learn to handle dynamite, you see. Nobody was injured and nobody that I know of ever charged. Things were taken more calmly 100 years ago.