Eighteen months for 'White Hat' Hacker

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/207 

By Kevin Poulsen
May 21, 2001 7:00 PM PT

San Jose, Calf.--Computer security researcher and former FBI informant
Max Butler was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison for launching
an Internet worm that crawled through hundreds of military and defense
contractor computers over a few days in 1998.

In handing down the sentence, federal judge James Ware rejected
defense attorney Jennifer Granick's argument that the Air Force, and
other victims of the worm, improperly calculated their financial
losses from the hack. The judge also declined to give Butler credit
for his brief stint as an undercover FBI informant, during which he
infiltrated a gang of hackers that had penetrated 3Com's corporate
phone network.

But the judge refused prosecutor Ross Nadel's request that Butler be
immediately taken into custody in the courtroom, and allowed the
hacker to remain free on bail until June 25th, when he's scheduled to
report to prison. With credit for good behavior, Butler will be
eligible for assignment to a community halfway house as early as April
of next year, and will be released in mid-October 2002. He'll then
serve three years of supervised release during which, under a special
order, Butler will be barred from accessing the Internet without
permission of his probation officer. Ware also ordered Butler to pay
$60,000 in restitution.

A consultant who specializes in performing penetration tests on
corporate networks, the 28-year-old remained well regarded in computer
security circles even after his March, 2000 indictment. Butler is
known for his expertise in intrusion detection: the science of
automatically analyzing Internet traffic for "signatures" indicative
of an attack, and he created arachnids, a popular open source catalog
of attack signatures that forms part of an overall public resource at
WhiteHats.com

Butler, known as "Max Vision" to friends and associates, crossed the
line in June of 1998, at a time when much of the Internet was still
vulnerable to a hole that had been discovered months earlier in a
ubiquitous piece of software called the BIND "named" domain server.
The hacker group ADM published a computer program capable of spreading
through vulnerable systems automatically. Butler launched a special
strain of the worm that penetrated systems, but also automatically
closed the BIND hole as it spread, forestalling attacks from other
hackers.

Tall and soft-spoken, wearing a blazer and rumpled cargo pants, the
hacker apologetically told Judge Ware that he got caught up in the
need to close a serious security hole.

"I got swept up," said Butler. "It's hard to explain the feelings of
someone who's gotten caught up in the computer security field... I
felt at the time that I was in a race. That if I went in and closed
the holes quickly, I could do it before people with more malicious
intentions could use them."

Butler did not address why he left malevolent features from the ADM
worm in his own program, including one that created a secret back door
on every system it penetrated.

"What I did was reprehensible," Butler told the court. "I've hurt my
reputation in the computer security field. I've hurt my family and
friends."

Judge Ware emphasized the need to deter other hackers. "There's a need
for those who would follow your footsteps to know that this can result
in incarceration," said Ware.




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