Nets and State

[Caid Ivik]

Few months ago, an unknown hacker analyzed activity on a webmail and then easily entered root of the National Security Bureau (NBU) network in Slovakia. Easy password to login, to take control over server's filesystem, no password needed at all. They looked on the source code and found a way to its database, well, no need to talk about it ;) Primary consequence was a victory song at blackhole.sk, followed by a short debate about internet security and competence of NBU programmers. However, the next one was yesterday. The police took the server Onyx, which hosted one of the largest discussion forums in Slovakia. A reason? It may hold information about it.

Question stays, how should a state deal with this?

Rewarding hackers for finding an error, while they swear they would do no harm, seems as an absurd option. The same could be said about any round-up against autonomous activity on private servers.

[nemafakei]

Hey, at least they're doing it in their own country. The US likes to seize servers in the UK. More recently, a hacker from the UK managed to get into some Pentagon systems through logons without passwords. There are laws to deal with international hacking cases in the UK, but he's being shipped out instead.

Is it me, or would the proportionate response in the NBU's case be to offer the hacker a job?

[Acriku]

It usually takes an intrusion like this to convince state departments or companies that they need to upgrade and fix their network security. I think it's a necessity for these kinds of things.

[Caid Ivik]

action continues - NBU has been disconnected from internet by a hacker strike...

http://www.sme.sk/c/2816412/Hackeri-tvrdia-ze-o-1600-odpojili-NBU-od-internetu.html