Hacking for a good cause
31715
Brad Willman was installing networking equipment out of an emergency van in British Columbia when a policeman showed up and asked for him. Willman knew the officer from a case he was involved with a couple of years earlier, so he didn&#39;t worry -- until he arrived at the police station and was introduced to a couple of U.S. cops.The visit marked the end of Willman&#39;s version of vigilante justice.A Trojan Horse Used For GoodIt was 2000, and Willman was 19. He had spent the last few years surreptitiously distributing a Trojan horse program to more than 1,000 people to try to uncover child-porn activities. All told, Willman said his work sent around 70 people to prison.But then Willman stumbled on a prominent California judge. He discovered that Ronald Kline, at the time a superior court judge in Orange County, had a big collection of child porn and a diary on his PC indicating he was planning to try to seduce young boys. The high-profile case put an end to Willman&#39;s career as a crime-fighter.&quot;Oh, I knew it was illegal,&quot; Willman said in a recent phone&#160;interview. &quot;But I really didn&#39;t care. I felt if I&#39;m helping a few people in the process, cool.&quot; Until Kline, Willman had managed to stay anonymous.The Origins of the ProgramWillman didn&#39;t initially set out to chase child pornographers. He started out developing a program designed to compete with pcAnywhere, Symantec&#39;s software that lets users access computers remotely.But then, while discussing programming on various newsgroups, he had a conversation with a Canadian man who offered his six-year-old daughter to Willman.&quot;That was an awkward scenario,&quot; Willman says, putting it mildly.Willman quickly contacted the police, who were able to prosecute the Edmonton man, he said.&quot;He&#39;s more or less what altered my mind from competing with pcAnywhere to making a Trojan to see who else is doing this,&quot; he said.Willman used the work he&#39;d already developed on the program to trick suspected pedophiles into unknowingly downloading the software so that he could get proof from their computers.How Willman Used the Trojan HorseWillman would visit child-porn newsgroups and post his program as a file that looked like it contained a photo. In order to avoid suspicion, Willman built in an additional feature. When the program launched without opening a photo, he designed it so that the first time it loaded it would display any photo from the directory to the user.After someone downloaded the software, Willman could look through their files remotely for illicit documents or photos.Once he found damning information, he&#39;d copy and share it with various child-porn watchdog groups, who could then pursue the perpetrators.Everything changed when Kline downloaded the Trojan and Willman found damning evidence on the judge&#39;s computer.Willman passed the information on to one of the watchdog groups as usual and figured that was that -- until the day the police showed up while he was at work.The police from the U.S. told him that they found him through correspondence sent from his computer to one of the watchdog groups.While the police were initially friendly because Willman was able to give them additional information on Kline, they later told him that if he does any more hacking, ever, they&#39;ll arrest him. Willman signed an agreement that he wouldn&#39;t hack and that he wouldn&#39;t have anything to do with child porn.Legal Barriers to Willman&#39;s VigilantismVarious state and federal laws in the U.S. criminalize unauthorized access to computers, said Jeff Neuburger, an attorney specializing in technology at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman &amp; Steiner, an international law firm based in New York City. If Willman hadn&#39;t agreed to the deal with the police, he could have been charged with violating state or federal laws. But even in that case, so long as he didn&#39;t set foot in the U.S., it would have been difficult for American authorities to prosecute him, Neuburger said.He&#39;s seeing more and more cases like Willman&#39;s, where people are using the Internet to accomplish good, but sometimes with questionable means. &quot;In the U.S., prosecutors are careful not to let something like this go without sending a message that what the person did was wrong,&quot; he said. &quot;But they may not aggressively seek a severe sentence or punishment.&quot;One problem with vigilante work like Willman&#39;s is that someone might make a mistake and affect innocent people, Neuburger warned. HadWillman wrongly accused someone, he could have faced much bigger legal problems. &quot;It&#39;s a dangerous thing,&quot; he said.Retiring the TrojanHis days in the spotlight behind him, Willman, now 27, lives with his parents in Langley, B.C., where he does phone tech support for a small cable company. He does computer repair on the side and dreams of becoming a computer security researcher.As for Kline, he was sentenced earlier this year to 27 months in prison, a sentence that Willman called &quot;reasonable.&quot;Once in a while, Willman still gets a request from someone asking for his help in busting someone involved with child porn. He can only refer them to the watchdog groups he was familiar with.&quot;I would like to help these people get their kids in a better position, but I can&#39;t because the type of research I&#39;d have to do is stuff I&#39;m not allowed to do anymore,&quot; he said.Even though Willman knew his actions were illegal, he didn&#39;t consider the consequences. &quot;I thought I covered my tracks pretty well,&quot; he said.&quot;And I did until the Judge Kline thing. I didn&#39;t really think I&#39;d get busted.&quot;
497038
An academic real world -- plus, a chance to win $1,000.
444444
ON THE SCENE - During an updated version of one of the more popular sessions at TechEd each year, senior security engineer and Microsoft MVP Marcus Murray demonstrated the use of some very simple hacking tools that can enable not-so-knowledgeable people to work their way to revealing the passwords of domain administrators in as little as 15 minutes.
587711
Hackers could bypass security warnings and download malicious content.
462910
Jason Larsen types in a few lines of computer code to hack into the controls of a nearby chemical plant. Then he finds an online video camera inside and confirms that he has pumped up a pressure value.
32085
Innovative ideas and technology provide many ways to give--time, money or both.
450340
The old thinking goes that to change the world, you have to give millions. But young tech-savvy philanthropists are trying to prove otherwise.
147940
Hacking for fun has evolved into hacking for profit, and created a business model nearly as sophisticated as that of legal software.
732414
SINGAPORE - Armed with laptops, modems, hard disk drives and sandwiches, 12 computer experts hunkered down Friday for a seven-hour contest to find the best hacker in tech-savvy Singapore.    Divided into six two-man teams, the contestants participating in "BlackOPS: HackAttack challenge 2004" have to defend their networks and servers from hacking while attacking other teams' systems...
4497
Within days of the release of the security bulletin, there was proof of concept code available on the web. As the exploit was analyzed by various security groups, it was found that it was similar
451473
The CanSecWest security research conference promoters are thinking about giving hackers another shot at hacking a Mac, as well as Linux- and Windows-based PCs.
234521
The CanSecWest security research conference promoters are thinking about giving hackers another shot at cracking the Mac. Only this time, they're looking to broaden the field.
257003
By Chandra Devi  HOAX and scams are getting bolder these days leveraging on high speed technology to get faster and more results.
276381
The gift that keeps on giving? Volunteer to do the financial paperwork.
110633
Kits that claim to help people hack into computers have been discovered for sale on the auction website eBay.
168965
A nonprofit group in Mumbai is spearheading an effort to place keyloggers -- which many computer users would regard as spyware -- on public machines in cybercaf&eacute;s. Reaction is mixed, and police have yet to give their assent to the plan.
184683
A effort by a Seattle company at Black Hat DC to demo a device that easily hacks data from a popular RFID-based ID card system has been met by a patent-infringement claim. Meanwhile, legislators attempt to wrap laws around the security issues.