IT consultant in Germany fined for exposing shoddy security::Spotting a plaintext password and using it in research without authorization deemed a crime
I hope it gets reversed in the next instance. The judge had it absolutely wrong. And the consultant did not expose it, but told the company directly that he is able to read the admin password without an effort. They sued for telling them. That’s absolutely the worst thing to do.
The people that write laws and the systems that enforce laws are inept to an unbeliavable degree when dealing with anything cyber related so I have less than zero expectations that this gets reversed and actually expect a worse outcome should there be an appeal.
Because somehow only the most incompetent morons appear to be able to make it to judge or law maker.
The problem is that any judge can judge any domain they have zero knowledge about. They’re just expected to understand complex systems because they’re educated, and only required to know law (often not even that). The way it should be is that judges making decisions about complex domains should require a level of understanding or specialisation in that domain — judges judging cybersecurity should also have a background in some sort of computer science or engineering discipline.
Otherwise we’re just allowing “the internet is a series of tubes” people to dictate human progress.
Not quite. He entered the password into phpMyAdmin and that’s when he went too far. Because from that point on he had access to protected data. You might think that’s silly, but that’s the law at the moment and the court has to apply it.
actually, that’s not what the law says.
the law says that “overcoming” security measures is a crime. nothing was “overcome”.
plaintext is simply not a “security measure” and the law was applied wrong.
there may have been some form of infringement in regards to privacy or sensitive data or whatever, but it definitely wasn’t “hacking” of any kind.
just like it isn’t “hacking” to browse someone’s computer files when they leave a device unlocked and accessible to anyone. invasion of privacy? sure. but not hacking.
and the law as written (§202a StGB) definitely states that security measures have to be circumvented in order to be applied.
that’s the problem with the case!
not that the guy overstepped his bounds, but that the law was applied blatantly wrong and no due diligence was used in determining the outcome of the case.
That’s your interpretation. The court said that at the moment he gained unlawful access to sensitive information he was in violation of the law. And I agree that entering a password you found is going too far. If you leave your car unlocked it’s still not OK for others to snoop around inside. Reporting a clear text password would have solved the issue just fine and not violated any laws.
That’s disgusting. That dude brought to light a serious security issue and is being punished for it. -_-
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.
The original article contains 659 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
