Justin P. Webb writes: Viral Tolat, ex-CTO of Integral Development Company, is accused by his former company of copying gigabytes of source code and confidential files on his way out the door to a position with another company. He copied the source code to multiple places and uploaded some of the data to his personal Google Docs…
Category: Federal
This hacker might seem shady, but throwing him in jail is bad for everyone
Timothy B. Lee writes: On Friday, the U.S. government filed its brief in the appeal of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, who was convicted of federal hacking charges for downloading hundreds of thousands of customer e-mail addresses from AT&T’s Web site. The government says the conviction was proper, but many security researchers and civil liberties advocates argue that the…
Mandatory Data Breach Notice Bill Stalls As Canadian Parliament Session Closed
Peter Menyasz reports: The Canadian government’s Sept. 13 decision to end the Parliament’s legislative session has at least temporarily blocked passage of proposed amendments (Bill C-12) to Canada’s framework federal privacy law that would have introduced a limited mandatory data breach notification requirement. A new parliamentary session is scheduled to start Oct. 16, and the…
District Court Holds That Intentionally Circumventing IP Address Block Is “Unauthorized Access” Under the CFAA
Orin Kerr writes: During the debate over the Aaron Swartz case, one of the legal issues was whether Swartz had committed an unauthorized access under the CFAA when he changed his IP address to circumvent IP address blocking imposed by system administrators trying to keep Swartz off the network. There was significantly more to the…
AT&T Hacker ‘weev’ Tests Limits of U.S. Crime Law on Website Use
Dune Lawrence and David Voreacos report: He is a red-headed hacker who hails from Arkansas, goes by the name “weev,” and seems to delight in being annoying. For years, he broke into computer systems, disrupted blog sites and riled people with personal attacks. Now his case has become a flashpoint in the debate over where…
FTC Fires Back In Lawsuit Against Wyndham
Brent Kendall reports: The Federal Trade Commission is offering a strong defense of its powers to police cybersecurity practices against a challenge by Wyndham Worldwide Corp. We wrote about Wyndham’s challenge earlier this month in a case involving attacks by hackers on the hotel chain’s computer systems between 2008 and 2010. The FTC sued Wyndham last year…