

Everything a Hacker Needs to Know about Getting Busted by the Feds (1997) - sp332
http://web.textfiles.com/hacking/agentsteal.txt

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bryanh
Interesting excerpt: "They may decide to, for insurance purposes, blame some
huge downtime expense on you. I can hear it now, "When we detected the
intruder, we promptly took our system off-line. It took us two weeks to bring
it up again for a loss in wasted manpower of $2 million." In some cases you
might be better off just using the company's payroll system to cut you a
couple of $10,000 checks. That way the government has a firm loss figure."

How insane.

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tptacek
I used to think the exact same thing. It looks insane from the outside. But
when you cause a real incident at a large company, a good chunk of those loss
numbers are easily traceable. $2MM on manpower alone is spectacularly high,
but remember that a fully-loaded headcount/week could easily range from
$3000-$4000. A company with thousands of servers will lose far more than 2
weeks in forensics work after a genuine breakin.

We're talking about companies with cash flows in the tens/hundreds of millions
of dollars per day. It doesn't seem real to the kind of people who break into
computers in the same way, say, a nuclear reactor does. But it's real.

~~~
bryanh
I absolutely agree with you, I can imagine the time I'd spend digging around
on my own little VPS after a break-in... I really meant "How insane are the
rules for sentencing based on arbitrary $$$ values."

~~~
tptacek
The process as a whole would be sane if there was messaging, education, and
reliable enforcement. As it stands, it's really just an inverse lottery that
you don't find out about until you lose/win.

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lockem
I love reading about the old school hackers, It amazing what you can do with a
whistle for example -
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_Draper>

Too bad the who wrote this article is no longer with us -
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Justin_Tanner...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Justin_Tanner_Petersen).

In any case my gut feeling is that if you get into trouble - get a real
lawyer. Using this or any legal advice you get online might actually make your
situation worse.

~~~
rickr
Justin Peterson (the author) was an FBI informant who helped put Kevin Mitnick
and Kevin Poulson in jail. I believe he escaped a large portion of his jail
time by selling out friends.

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Mizza
The latest Phrack also had this article, 'How to make it in Prison'

[http://phrack.com/issues.html?issue=67&id=5#article](http://phrack.com/issues.html?issue=67&id=5#article)

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jimwise
Any advice on what a hacker needs to know about getting busted by the swedes?

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rdl
"No means no".

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pstuart
Let's all jump on the character assassination bandwagon!

What I've read so far is that "No" means "condom failure" or how dare you not
call me back:
[http://takimag.com/article/julian_assanges_honey_trap_thats_...](http://takimag.com/article/julian_assanges_honey_trap_thats_rape_in_sweden/print)

~~~
enjo
Here is what the swedes have to say:

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iLBCk...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iLBCkkC5l0NVV0gEYkAA04x83Wrg?docId=B32488671291733403A00)

