Youth cleared of trying to hack Mossad Web site

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/399602.html

By Yuval Dror and Yuval Yoaz
Haaretz Correspondents
March 01, 2004 

The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court acquitted Sunday an Israeli youth
charged with attempting to hack the Web site of the Mossad secret
service. Presiding judge Abraham Tennenbaum, who found that Avi
Mizrahi had not attempted to break into the site, but had merely been
attempting to assess the security level, even praised the defendant
for "acting in the public good."
 
"In a way," wrote Tennenbaum, "Internet surfers who check the
vulnerabilities of Web sites are acting in the public good. If their
intentions are not malicious and they do not cause any damage, they
should even be praised," Tennenbaum wrote in his decision.

Mizrahi was charged in June 2003 with attempting to hack the Mossad
site. Mizrahi's attorney, Omri Kabiri, told Haaretz during the trial
that his client sent his resume to the Mossad via a site set up by the
secret service to recruit new employees.

Thereafter, Mizrahi used an automatic program to check the level of
security on the site to which he sent his resume. Mizrahi never
revealed which program he used nor whether he knew that it checked the
Internet server on which the site for known security holes.

Prosecutors summoned an expert witness who claimed that Mizrahi's
attack on the Web site showed the youth's expertise in Internet
security. But the judge dismissed this argument in his ruling. "The
defendant is far from being an expert on security or hacking, and
doesn't even presume to be," Tennenbaum wrote.
 


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