

How a whitehat hacked a university and became an FBI target - aburan28
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he-hacked-university-of-maryland-contractor-turned-hacker-tells-all/

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ryan1234567890
"posting the university president’s Social Security number and phone number to
reddit."

Isn't exactly "white hat"

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Relys
Whitehat hackers know only to traverse, scan and exploit the networks which
they own or have explicit written permission to use.

This guy got what was coming to him.

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pyre
Some of the stuff he did would be considered 'grey hat,' but stuff like
posting to Reddit is just plain stupid if he was trying to mitigate the
trouble that he could get into.

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BorisMelnik
Someone tell me how posting someones social security number online is
considered whitehat? Also the manner in which he communicated was very harsh.

It seemed as though he was taking his frustrations on his employer out on his
employers client.

Or perhaps all of this was his goal: hoping to get arrested, make a name for
himself as a "brilliant young hacker" to build up his own security consulting
firm.

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ajtaylor
Perhaps he had noble intentions, but any idiot can see that his methods were
beyond stupid. Posting a SSN publicly is sure to get you noticed.

The other thing I noticed is that either the FBI has gotten really good
dealing with proxies/VPNs or the guy really didn't know what he was doing.

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pyre
I don't think that they needed to trace it back through the VPN. They started
asking questions at his workplace (for whatever reason), and a co-worker
turned over a chat log in which he was describing what he was doing. They
could have just been questioning The Canton Group through 'good old fashioned
police work.' It's not like The Canton Group was unconnected to the
University.

