Friday, March 16, 2001

Hacker sentenced to hacking A teenager who was convicted of defacing Web sites must serve a sentence that includes programming the jail's computers (see http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-03-09-coolio.htm). Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse! What's going to happen when he puts in some backdoors to change the behavior of the system to better suit his needs? Who will be able to correct the problems introduced this way? --Jeremy [We noted a case 15 years ago of a prisoner gaining access to the prison information system to change his release date, plus three cases of bogus release messages. PGN] ["Jeremy Epstein" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 29] 0:00 # G!