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.
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!
