Security News > 2011 > May > Qld cops denounce 'ethical hacking'

http://www.zdnet.com.au/qld-cops-denounce-ethical-hacking-339315264.htm By Stilgherrian ZDNet.com.au May 18th, 2011 Police have spoken out strongly against so-called "ethical hacking" in the wake of yesterday's demonstration of a Facebook privacy hack at the BSides Australia conference being held in parallel to the AusCERT 2011 information security conference. The incident has already seen a journalist arrested and his iPad seized. "I think cultures have built up where hacking, in the past, has been a part of a competition, and you have black hat conferences around the world. The technical reality is that on those occasions crimes may well have been committed," said Detective Superintendent Brian Hay, head of the Fraud and Corporate Crime Group of the Queensland Police Service. "It's probably quite sad, really, that we may have people out there that think it's their right to just go in, and it's a game, and it's not serious. The reality is, the online environment is now an extension of our real community, and if we go into that environment we have responsibilities to behave in a certain manner and not break the laws, just as we would walking down the street of our local neighbourhood." In yesterday's demonstration, Christian Heinrich had shown how he obtained from Facebook photographs of security contractor Chris Gatford and his family, including a child. His technique used a brute-force attack to guess the URLs of privacy-protected images stored on Facebook's content distribution network. [...] ___________________________________________________________ Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management, Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure. http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/

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