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

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Dissent

Sean Gallagher reports on an interesting revelation concerning the second data breach at the University of Maryland:

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.”

Read more on Ars Technica.

 

Related posts:

  • University of Baltimore exposed student identity information for more than three years: auditors (UPDATED)
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