Whitehat hacker goes too far, gets raided by FBI, tells all

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/whitehat-hacker-goes-too-far-gets-raided-by-fbi-tells-all/

By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
April 9, 2014

A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to 
drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. 
Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit.

David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software 
consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he 
claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to 
gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his 
employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the 
vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than 
300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers.

As Helkowski said to a co-worker in Steam chat, “I got tired of being 
ignored, so I forced their hand.” He penetrated the university’s network 
from home, working over multiple VPNs, and downloaded the personal data of 
members of the university’s security task force. He then posted the data 
to Pastebin and e-mailed the members of the task force anonymously on 
March 15.

One day later, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Helkowski’s home. 
While no charges have yet been filed against him, Helkowski’s employment 
with Canton Group has ended. And yesterday, he took to reddit to tell 
everyone about it in a post entitled “IamA Hacker who was Raided by the 
FBI and Secret Service AMAA!” To prove his identity, he even posted a 
redacted copy of the search warrant he was served.

How did the FBI track him down so fast? It turns out that Helkowski told 
just about everyone (including co-workers) about what he was doing. And 
since the vulnerability he used was the same one Canton Group had reported 
to UMD on February 27, it didn’t take a lot of sleuthing to follow a trail 
that pointed straight back to Helkowski’s home in the Baltimore suburb of 
Parkville.

[...]

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