RE: publicly available resources and the law

["Frank Miller" <frankm () bend or us>]

But what determines if a port scan was the light fingerprints of
an exploit?  When do you determine to spend a workday or hire a few
hours of a security jock to perform a system audit.

Case and point - lets say your logs displayed sshd scans that also
generated SEGV's?  If it was me, I'd have to spend a day
looking for possible succesful exploits, turning off sshd, and doing a stack
trace
of the core dump to close the stack issue, and warn the sshd maintainers.
I'll bet you could get this to stick as 'stolen' resources (based upon
past history with PD's).

I think you bring up a great point!  This is some pretty grey stuff, but I'd
still have to have charges pressed against me.

Frank

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dragos Ruiu [mailto:dr () v-wave com]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 1999 7:50 AM
> To: HD Moore; nmap-hackers () insecure org
> Subject: RE: publicly available resources and the law
>
>
> Interestingly enough, that posting about Oregon
> port-scanning laws led to a chat over coffee with
> my lawyer about hacking. He pointed me to an
> interesting case documented in the clipping below.
>
> His opinion was that it would be very difficult
> to make port-scanning stick in court, because you
> have to prove that the computer time or other
> "stolen" resources or information have value such
> that damages were incurred by their loss.
>
> I doubt that a few miliseconds of processing time
> to respond to a few errant UDP packets can be proven
> to have significant value.  So despite all the paranoid
> IT guys that freak out when port-mapped, I don't think
> I would worry about the legal system just yet. I think
> that even if you made the remote box reboot accidentally
> (or not), unless there was a pattern of systematic harrasment,
> they would have a hard time with the law.
>
> As you can see in the case below, you have to go through
> a lot to get hacking to stick as a crime. So if you
> are a script kiddie, the next time those Oregon cops
> show up on your doorstep, tell them to piss off and call
> your lawyer. But you better get the parental unit to
> shell out for a good lawyer if they can...
>
> just my two cents,
> --dr