Hacker thrown in jail for reporting police system security flaws

By -

Summary:The sentence probably wasn't quite the reward he was looking for.

 A hacker has been awarded a suspended sentence for disclosing security vulnerabilities in a Slovenian police system.

The student, 26-year-old Dejan Ornig, studied the Tetra police communication system and through his study found that the system contained security vulnerabilities due to incorrect configuration settings, among other issues.

Between 2012 and 2014, Ornig, alongside colleagues, discovered that Tetra did not always encrypt communication sent through the protocol. As Tetra is used by the military, the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Service and other agencies, a lack of encryption could have serious ramifications for intelligence and the country as a whole.
As noted by Security Affairs, the student then disclosed these security issues to law enforcement, but after waiting at least a year, there was no action taken to remedy the flaws.
As a result, Ornig decided to publicly disclose the issues in March this year -- something the Slovenian authorities were not happy with.

The public disclosure did result in the rapid patching of the security vulnerabilities. However, once the problems were fixed, law enforcement turned its gaze on the student and accused Ornig of attempting to hack into government networks on three separate occasions in 2014.The issue was made more complicated when law enforcement raided his home and found a fake police badge and recorded conversations related to Ornig's former employer.

According to local publication Pod Crto, Ornig was charged with attacks on information systems, the falsification of documents and "undue" audio recording.A Slovenian court handed down a suspended sentence of one year and three months in prison on 11 May.


In the past decade, ethical and "white hat" hacking has become more regulated through the use of bug bounty programs and financial incentives. However, it appears that despite dragging their feet to patch problems, some agencies do not take kindly to public disclosures forcing them to do so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Hacker steals data of millions of Bulgarians, emails it to local media

By -
Image
  Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a  message posted on its website  on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior  confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total ...
Read more

​Linux totally dominates supercomputers

By -
Image
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened:  All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the  November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the  first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc...
Read more

Microsoft tries to stem its self-made collaboration-tool confusion

By -
Image
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t...
Read more