IT consultant in Germany fined for exposing shoddy security::Spotting a plaintext password and using it in research without authorization deemed a crime
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Back in June 2021, according to our pals at Heise, an contractor identified elsewhere as Hendrik H. was troubleshooting software for a customer of IT services firm Modern Solution GmbH.
And we’re told that Modern Solution’s program files were available for free from the web, so truly anyone could inspect the executables in a text editor for plain-text hardcoded database passwords.
In June, 2023, a Jülich District Court in western Germany sided with the IT consultant because the Modern Solution software was insufficiently protected.
“The penalty order is all the more shocking because it is fundamentally wrong,” wrote Steier, the blogger who helped bring the exposed database to light, in a post on Wednesday.
In a post to Mastodon, Wladimir Palant, a security researcher, software developer, and co-founder of Germany-based ad filtering biz eyeo, expressed frustration with the court’s decision.
"But it’s exactly as people feared: no matter how flawed the supposed ‘protection,’ its mere existence turns security research into criminal hacking under the German law.
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