> While some of the "hacking" was no more than calling into voicemail accounts with no pin/password set...
Taking stuff from my house is still robbery even if I left the front door open.
Taking stuff from my house is still robbery even if I left the front door open.
Getting in to PIN-less voicemail boxes is like walking down a street and checking which doors are unlocked, and then assuming a lack of security means the owner is permitting you to take whatever you can find inside.
It would be more accurate to say that you left your curtains open, and someone took a picture of the inside of your house through the windows.
Maybe an invasion of privacy, but not theft.
And if I was naked at the time, and if they then sold those pictures of me, I'm fairly certain it would be a crime.
If you setup a directory /admin on your webserver, and forget to password protect it, and someone accesses it, you can't really call it hacking.
My point which you gloss over is in the definition of "attack".
Whether browsing to a publicly accessible url with no security is an attack or not, is a very grey area.
Whether or not accessing anything on a webserver is illegal depends partly on your intentions while doing so. That's a basic function of most court trials--to discern your intentions. For example, see the differences between the various degrees of murder, and the way such trials often hinge on "preconceived intent."
If my intention in accessing "/admin" was to access your server without your authorization to access some protected piece of information, damage computers, or defraud you, that may indeed be a crime. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html . It doesn't matter whether it was password protected or not. If I went there by accident, however, it probably was not a crime, although depending on what I accessed I may wind up having to go to court to prove that my intentions were benign.
In at least one case, voicemails were deleted from a murder victim's inbox.
One - they could have been evidence (apparently killers often leave sympathetic messages to try and deflect attention), and two - it made the parents and the police think she was still alive when she was in fact already dead.