Former Reuters Journalist Matthew Keys Sentenced to Two Years for Hacking
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The recommendation of 7 years is just crazy and even the lowered 5 years is just nuts. If you just look at the cost to the newspaper it was at one point almost a million dollars when the fix for the page was one editor reverting the page.
> In order to be convicted of felony under the particular provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which prosecutors used to charge Keys, the conduct must exceed a threshold of $5,000.
That someone is responsible for paying a company to sure up their security is an issue. Or the inflation of cost to so Federal Prosecutors can get another win under their belt. That over reach is pretty high in this case.
> Although rarely listed as an element, the common law required that "entry occur as a consequence of the breaking".[7] For example, if a wrongdoer partially opens a window with a pry bar—but then notices an open door, which he uses to enter the dwelling, there is no burglary under common law.
There are more results if you search for "breaking and entering", it was all pretty consistent.
Reading that WP article again, turns out I was just considering the common law part. It later says:
> The common law definition has been expanded in most jurisdictions, such that the building need not be a dwelling or even a building in the conventional sense, physical breaking is not necessary, the entry does not need to occur at night, and the intent may be to commit any felony or theft.
So I'll give it to you for "physical breaking is not necessary", even though I don't actually know about the jurisdiction in question. (I didn't rtfa.)
I don't see how you could access a computer without using "force", any input from a human constitutes force in my opinion. So no disagreement as far as the actual crime is concerned, I'm just nitpicking for fun...
You can walk into a house through an open door,
but you can't walk into a computer.A failure to change the locks does not mean you have created an attractive nuisance to former employees.
However, failure to collect keys get's into murky situations.
If a lessor or landlord in Illinois does not change or rekey the unit's lock before the day the new tenant or lessee takes possession, and a THEFT occurs at that dwelling unit that is attributable to the lessor's failure to change or rekey the lock, the landlord is liable for any damages from the theft that occurs as a result of the lessor's failure to comply with the law http://www.securitydepositlaw.com/blog/chicago-tenants-right...
But stipulate that it was true. What bearing does that have on this case? If I go into that office and steal $5000 worth of computer equipment, am I not liable for felony grand theft because the landlord has civil liability to the tenant?
Granted, this does not apply in your case, but Chicago does have mixed use Residential/Commercial leases which is covered.
Now suppose a tenant goes back to retrieve their property the day after there lease ends. Which under some situations they are allowed to do. Key works, the enter building...
IANAL, but would suggest this is a situation the owner would like to avoid.
But there is no sense in which that kind of liability mitigates the criminal actions of others. If I go into a building for which the landlord is liable for theft, and I steal $5000 worth of crap (or cause $5000 worth of damage), I'm going to be prosecuted for that if I'm caught, no matter the landlord's liability. Criminal liability isn't shared due to negligence, and when criminal liability is shared (among accomplices and co-conspirators), it's not divided up among the parties --- because that would be silly.
But, they can't claim time related to revoking his permissions because they should have done that in the first place. Ditto for performing a security audit ect.
This is a normal user using there CMS system, not an admin or developer messing with things.
If you're objecting to the idea that, having caused a breach, the convicted attacker is now on the hook for securing the application they broke, so that the attack they used is no longer viable, I agree. That is in no way fair.
But that's not what's happening.
Instead, having been breached, and only because they've been breached, the victim is now in a position of needing to assess the extent of the damage done. They can't guess --- at least, not if they're a major corporation --- because continuing to operate when you have reason to believe you've been systemically compromised is unethical and dangerous.
That's the difference between a DF/IR audit and a security audit. A security audit tries to find all your vulnerabilities. A DFIR audit tries to scope the compromise and retain evidence. Of the two, the DFIR audit has a narrower scope and more specific purpose.
But, weirdly, it's also more expensive. There are more application security consultants than there are DFIR auditors, and DFIR auditors are often selected by insurance companies, not by the market.
At any rate: the costs we're talking about Keys having incurred are not a bonanza of free assessment work Trib gets to bill to Keys.
I accept that you feel an external audit is required. But, is it a reasonable expense directly incurred, no.
PS: As a parting piece of evidence. Was $10,206 to $13,147 likely to include DFIR audit and all other costs? No.
>In an unexpected twist, while going over the defense’s objections to the PSR, Judge Kimberly Mueller limited the amount of loss (for purposes of sentencing) to whatever had been presented at trial, thus drastically reducing the amount of prison time recommended by the sentencing guidelines. In the end, by the judge’s own determination, the appropriate range for sentencing was between 37 and 46 months.
So the actual sentence wasn't based on inflated numbers, and was lower than recommended based on actual numbers.
(Or are you saying the "evidence" of loss presented at trial was fake?)
If you're operating a company with real customers and real cash flow at any kind of real scale, and you suffer a serious breach, figure $50,000-$60,000 is table stakes for getting that breach resolved.
The intuition you need, to price these things out, is that once an attacker obtains unexpected unauthorized access to a system, the very next thing they do (and, in this case, the very next thing they tried to do --- much to Keys chagrin) is extend and persist access. Which means that if you're resolving a breach, you have to re-assess every system that the attackers got unexpected access to and verify that they didn't (a) implant something that will restore access in the future or (b) uncover some latent vulnerability that would allow them to do that.
Nobody reliably assesses internal systems (those systems you get unexpected access to once you successfully obtain unauthorized access). Nobody. An attacker gets behind the login prompt on a CMS you've deployed? You probably need to re-assess the whole CMS, because a big chunk of your security for that CMS probably relied on the idea that attackers don't know and can't reach all the URL endpoints behind the login prompt. The attacker gets code execution somehow? Now they're on your internal network, and the same goes for every system on the internal network.
It adds up fast. And your insurance company will (a) demand that you pay it, and (b) shortlist your DFIR vendors for you.
Not fun times.
[EDIT:] I see you've added some material that explains why investigations cost more. That seems reasonable, but in many cases attackers are not within the reach of prosecution. If we allow firms to blame the "hacker" for needing to investigate how bad their security is, ISTM we're letting them shift the blame to parties who can't actually fix their problems.
Meanwhile: they clearly can't just revert the web page. Keys gave a hacker group a login for a web application. How, exactly, does Trib Corp know how much damage the hacker group did to the server? There needs to be an investigation, and the norm is that the investigation should be done by a third party.
Meanwhile, there's a principle in the law that you take the victim as they come. In US tort law, it's called "the eggshell skull rule". It means if you hit someone over the head with a book or something and unexpectedly fracture their skull because it turns out to have been as thin as an eggshell, you are still responsible for the damage you caused.
It isn't at all clear to me that the eggshell rule is relevant to this situation. This was not an act of violence. Packets were exchanged among computers, which resulted in other packets being exchanged among computers. The "legal reasoning by tortured analogy" one sees so often on HN has really crippled our collective intelligence.
The person who smacks the eggshell-skulled victim upside the head with a magazine couldn't imagine that doing so would have fractured their skull. People don't normally have skulls as thin as eggshells. "Tough shit", says the law. "If you don't want to expose yourself to the risk of fracturing someone's skull, don't hit people upside their heads with magazines."
By the same token, whatever frailties existed in Trib Corp's internal security, necessitating expensive post-breach cleanup, are justifiably imputed to Keys, not to Trib Corp.
As described above, against a firm with a modicum of security procedure, this "attack" would have been a no-op. As in, all the same actions could have been taken, and they would have had no effect whatsoever. "Attacks" like this take place every day, and many even succeed, with no action from prosecutors whatsoever.
You and I have different conceptions of justice. It may well be that yours conforms more exactly to that enforced by the courts; we don't live in a perfect world.
Rather, when it's heard, it's quickly silenced as in this case. (Keys was explicitly fired for political reasons. Who doubts he was prosecuted for the same reasons?) There isn't a chance that a similar episode at a small-town newspaper or independent broadcaster or even a popular online-only media site would receive the publicly-funded attention of a federal prosecutor. Most of those dream of higher public office, and they all know whom to make happy and whom to ignore, to make those dreams come true.
Resident HN Qin Dynasty fans might think the problem I describe is one of insufficient enforcement, that if only every knucklehead site defacement could be punished with the full weight of the USA-Justice Dept., we'd live in a utopia. Please realize, however, that this arbitrary authoritarianism is the only possible use of such a law, because it is the design of the law. There will never be enough federal prosecutors to send everyone involved with any defacement anywhere to prison. The point is not to prevent site defacement. The point is to centralize, to provide every benefit to large corporations and deny the same to other firms. That's actually the point of most laws that get passed nowadays. In this case, since this is a media company, the specific point is to control public discourse and destroy those who challenge it, and thereby to keep those profits and campaign donations up. For the rest of us, the cure is worse than the disease.
Security experts are the real fools, when they support the criminalization of minor shit like this. You're going to get paid anyway, whether someone goes to FPMITAP or not. In fact, you'd probably get paid more, if more people were comfortable poking giants in the eye. Executives bitch about all consultants, but do you imagine there is any particular type of consultant they'd be happier to fire? Giant corporations are not good, they are not your friends, and you owe them only the services they purchase. You don't owe them any political allegiance, and sending people like this to prison actually harms you in the long run.
I suppose there's a completely coherent argument to be made that anything you do with a computer to someone else's computer that doesn't cause physical, kinetic damage shouldn't be a crime. I'm unlikely to agree with that argument, though, so while it's good to know that that's what you think, we're probably at diminishing returns on this thread.
I stipulated at the very top of the thread that the investigation was surely very expensive. Most citizens wish these giant conglomerates, whether in media or banking or whatever, were smaller. We're not mollified when the costs of their giant size are passed along to the taxpayer and average citizen.
Actual crimes with actual harms to actual victims should still be crimes, whether they involve computers or not.
Even if you adopt the position that we should have laws that treats victims differently depending on how big their companies are, that wouldn't have much bearing on this case.
Why denigrate a CMS when it's well established that Tribune Media weren't removing the passwords of fired employees? If you're sure they're still not doing that, it will be grimly hilarious the next time this happens.
If you find out that someone's been coming into your house when you're not there for a few weeks, but you're not entirely sure how, you don't just change your key, you also check all your windows, possibly fix the latch or replace the window on any that are broken, etc.
The cost should generally be limited to the actual damage done by the hacker, rather than include things that the company should have been doing anyway.
After someone uses an open window to obtain entry, does that mean that they can be charged with the cost of locating and auditing every copy of every physical key to the premises, on the basis that they could have found one and stolen it while they were in the building?
Your infrastructure should aim to be robust against people persisting themselves (in this case, something that allows an employee to persist themselves beyond the validity of their credentials is a serious problem whether the hacker does it or not). Where it is not, that's your failing. Charging the hacker for finding out where your infrastructure is failing is perverse since if anything their attack made it easier to spot a failing. If they did persist themeselves, then obviously the cost to fix that belongs on the hacker, but the cost to identify such things is something you should be doing anyway.
I don't understand how you could impute the cost of auditing infrastructure for backdoors that could have been planted in a breach to the victim of the breach, rather than to the person convicted of causing the breach. We're not talking about having each of Trib Corp's applications assessed (the cost of that would be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars, minimum).
At some point we have to acknowledge these tough cyber laws do nothing but pass down intentionally harsh sentences to the unlucky few Americans that get the book thrown at them.
I predict we'll look back at them with the same embarrassment and shame we do mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws now.
So one way to look at this is that he got the same amount of time, or less, he likely would have gotten if he had physically broken in and changed the title of the physical print of the paper (or had been an accomplice to others who actually perpetuated the criminal acts).
It's also becoming clear that the plaintiffs in these cases are completely washing their hands of their own responsibility for the crime. I understand that this is common in case law such as this, but if we want to actually secure this country against real cyber criminals then we need companies to step up and take responsibility for what's happening within their networks.
That's like saying you can get in trouble for giving someone a key to your old apartment, and then they go use it to unlock the door and do whatever they feel like inside. Or can you get in trouble for this, as maybe, an accessory?