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Reuters Accused Of Hacking For Typing In URL
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Oct 29, 2002 04:23 AM
from the permission-granted-or-denied dept.
from the permission-granted-or-denied dept.
Aexia writes "Intentia International, a company in Sweden, is suing Reuters for publishing an earnings report posted on their website prior to its official release. The catch? The report couldn't be accessed through 'normal channels', you had to know, or guess, what address to type in order to retrieve it. The precedent this case sets will be interesting. If you don't use a hyperlink on a website, are you committing a crime? You can also read Intentia's take on the situation."
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Reuters Accused Of Hacking For Typing In URL
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Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's [slashdot.org] a related thread from yesterday.
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Interesting)
This story sounds like someone got careless, and didn't lock down the folder the data lived in.
Sounds also like someone (their admin?) is trying to cover up the error by reporting to his (clueless?) bosses that obviously it was hacked, else how could they -ever- get that information, right? (yeah, right.)
Perhaps the admin should check out this handy url and order his copy soon.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1
I know I did, and it's invaluable.
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. A Domino server out of the box includes full HTTP services. This is part of the generic install. No additional HTTP software is needed, although you *can* configure Domino to use an alternative HTTP stack if you prefer.
Why isn't there a moderation setting for "incorrect?"
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:4, Insightful)
While I'd normally agree, if its protected by some kind of protection (htaccess) - even if its really weak, accessing in would be cracking, same as if a door in a house is open, you still cant nick the TV.
Of course in this case google would have spidered the report before long and they cant prosecute an automatic robot can they?
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Insightful)
But, wouldn't most search engines also at least try to grab index.html on directories in which they've found other files?
Of course, I doubt that's what happened here. From what I can tell on the "victim" website, Reuters just guessed what the URL for the report would be. Who hasn't done that before, in some way or another (e.g. guessing what a broken URL was supposed to be)?
There's clearly NO access control here, except a shining example of how security through obscurity is NOT security at all.
Xentax
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Informative)
No, Googlebot needs a link.
No, it doesn't.
Google plays tricks with servers. With apache, for instance it tries the venerable www.site.com/?M=A and ?S=D, ?N=A etc. tricks. If Apache isn't locked down, it'll happily bypass index.html and give you directory listings, and then spider any subdirectories using the same method. I had several of my unpublished directories found by google this way.
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Interesting)
I was running the Google Toolbar, and I had some un-linked content on our live web server. Then my boss just happened to be searching for some of that info on Google, and bam! The "secret" pages on our web server show up! Content that was indeed on the web but did not have any outside hyperlinks pointing to it was being cached by Google.
How did Google find it? The only thing I can think of is that the Google Toolbar noticed that I went to that unpublished URL and "phoned home." (By the way, the web server is running IIS 5.0/Windows 2000, so I doubt those Apache tricks would work, though there must be similar tricks for IIS.)
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Insightful)
> While I'd normally agree, if its protected by some kind of protection (htaccess) - even if its really weak, accessing in would be cracking, same as if a door in a house is open, you still cant nick the TV.
No, the correct analogy is "if you stand naked in your doorway you can't complain about everyone seeing your naughties".
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, there are "Peeping Tom" laws for residences and businesses. So, even looking in, if I leave the blinds up, can be illegal.
Kierthos
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that my house isn't a public place.
The report was put in a PUBLIC location. Therefore it's up to them to restrict access. Simply "not telling anyone" isn't restricting access.
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Whine and moan all they want, they still stuck it in a public place. They should have stuck it behind a locked closed door. Then it's secure. If you bust open the door, that would be a crime. Finding something sitting in a public place that's not advertised is not a crime.
Re:Related: what about referer logs (Score:4, Interesting)
An employee of a company takes their earnings report to a trainstation and leaves it there. A random person who happends to be a journalist picks it up and reads it through. He realises that this is dynamite since his paper will be the first one printing it so he decides to print it.
Now will that journalist be guilty of espinage or will the employee at the company be the one to blame? I think none doubts it will be the employee making the mistake and I can't see the difference in puting it on their official website. Of course none knows what it is and it's hard to find just like a random paper in a train station. But the fact remains, someone at the company put the secret paper in a public forum in which someone happend to find it.
I wonder what will happend if they win the sue. Will everyone linking to a page be forced to check constatly that the site they are linking to still has an 'official' link to the document, or risk facing charges?
Stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your analogy is that they didn't even use a lock and key. Their doors were open for business and now they are getting mad that someone came in before they could put up the big neon "OPEN" sign.
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
People walking by in the street can not be charged with peeping if they see you walking naked in youre house. Not even if they have to turn their heads to do it. Simply claiming that since you are doing it in youre own house you are supposed to have privacy is not valid. You have to draw the curtains for the expectancy of privacy to be granted.
Now the question is, did they have the curtains drawn. I personally think not. It will be intressting to see what the law has to say about it.
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
He could not. If you put something on a
It has nothing to do with peeping either. There's no 'smaller hole' you have to go through technically in order to obtain the requested document from the server. http://www.company.com/secretreports.html is just as available as http://www.company.com/index.html. Site portals are just yellow pages that help you find those URLs. Am I forbidden to dial a phone number that I didn't find in the phone book?
If you want to protect a secret and assume that something will remain hidden, you need to take
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
The plaintiff did not have the metaphorical curtains drawn. There was no realistic way to know the report was supposed to be hidden. The lack of a hyperlink to that report could mean a million different things--they forgot to add the link, they were publishing the report's URL in meatspace media, the link was in a place the defendant didn't know about, the link was propagated via email (hence not visible on any website), or whatever.
But there's only one good way to tell people to stay away from a given web document--the 403 response code.
The simplest common-sense defense would be to remind the court that the plaintiff's server gave a 200 response code. Defendants asked for a document and plaintiff provided it, where is the tort?
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Yesterday, I, as an IT professional that makes purchasing decision for a large organisation, had never heard from this company. Now I know they make Collaborative Solutions. All it cost them was a bogus courtcase with Reuters.
This is clever marketing, nothing more, nothing less. Anyone can spot the lack of merits of this case from a mile away. Brand and name recognition of this company is soaring though. I wonder how their stock price is taking it?
Any publicity is good publicity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, this is a pretty bad way to get your name out - an IT company that doesn't understand the web any better than this? I wouldn't hire them to do anything, they sound totally incompetent. But they say any publicity is good publicity...
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
This company clearly messed up. A news agency got some information (and not by hacking!) and published it. The information wasn't fraudulant. If it was false, it wasn't with a disregard for the truth--after all, it was in a document on the company's website. But the company in question didn't like the fact that the information got out, so they sue the news company.
Forget terrorism and its effect on "free speech and free press" (right now a mostly US-centric concern) the real danger is big budget corporations who have the money and time to spend taking you to court because they didn't like what you had to say. It's scary, folks, and it's not getting any better.
Re:Ridiculous! (Score:5, Interesting)
Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
"Reuters News Agency Broke into Intentia's IT Systems"
I would not call it breaking in to surf on someones homesite.
"there was an unauthorized entry via an IP-address belonging to Reuters"
What do they mean, do I have to call them and ask for permission before accessing files publically available on their homesite?
As Reuters didn't steal anything, but simply pointed at on open window (that they found) I would have to say that their act was not illegal. What they should investigate is their internal safety policies, because they need a revision or two (IMHO).
Re:Stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
Once this information was in the puiblic domain then I think their best policy would have been to do nothing, perhaps just issue the information with the best spin they could.
Taking them to court seems like a REALLY BAD idea.
Nothing to do with links. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not about the existence (or not) of the link, but the source of the URL. While I don't agree with it, I think what they are saying is that if a site doesn't publish a URL (usually through a link, but could be in print, etc) it is not public information and accessing it is unauthorised access. This is the same attitude (if not specific issue) that has a problem with deep-linking [slashdot.org] too.
Re:that's cold man. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is precisely what you'd expect them to do, Reuters being a press agency and all.
I court I hope Reuters don't get busted for accessing the information, but for publishing details about it.
Damn straight. If it weren't for those goddamned financial journalists, I bet Enron would still be trading today. The freedom of the press has got no business interfering with our right to earn a dishonest dollar.
After all I'm sure that the company in question had a copyright notice on all their pages, right?
So what? Do you really believe Reuters breached their copyright in the report?
Get a jar of glue, man.
mandatory pr0n reference (Score:5, Funny)
it doens't take long to figure out where the other pics are.
Re:mandatory pr0n reference (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mandatory pr0n reference (Score:4, Funny)
There are technical solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
If the publishers of the resource wanted to limit access to the resource they could add authentication, referer checking, or a timestamp check - anything, really. Since they did not, I fail to see how they can have a case.
"Security through obscurity", like having a non-linked but available resource, is self delusion.
Re:There are technical solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
That's one of those mantras that get repeated until people believe they're true.
Fact is, all security is obscurity. Security rests on the notion of a shared secret. Some key that both you and the other guy know.
In my opinion, any HTTP GET request is exactly that, a request. "May I have that resource, Server Sir?".
So if I add a login header, is that just another GET request? It's the difference between http://root:12345@www.0wn3d.com/ and http://www.0wn3d.com/.
Or what if I add an obscure folder name to the URL like sf908h234ff98hs9f?
You might argue that the actual crime was in obtaining the password, and I agree that (for example) fraudulently claiming to be an employee (psychological hacking) is criminal, but it's a seperate offense.
That's why breaking into someone's house is "breaking & entry." Even if you don't have to break in, entering is still criminal.
The problem with "ah well, these guys were just poking around, the publishers should have used proper security" is that it raises the bar of what security is to what we experts think it ought to be. Many people don't have the capability to employ such measures, so we're denying them legal recourse.
It would cause the same kind of division in society as if we had a law that said burglary doesn't count unless you have an expensive security system.
Re:There are technical solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
1. These people are experts.
2. From a practical viewpoint, it should not have been on that server if it wasn't to be served. Anyone with sensitive data should at least be able to employ that measure.
3. Why should they have legal recourse against typing things in the address bar of a browser?
Re:There are technical solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
No. In that case, you're trying to circumvent (by having illegally obtained or by guessing the password) a security measure. (Also see below.)
No. There is a difference between trying to receive information (i.e. trying to have it delivered to me), and trying to actively enter someone else's property. The breaking-in analogy is fundamentally flawed, at least as long as we're not talking about trying to circumvent any security that is installed (e.g. trying to guess passwords -- that would be trying to actively enter).
Also note that houses (and physical locations in general) usually make it quite obvious whether they're supposed to be public or private. All private houses, even if they have no locks or security systems, have an implicit security mechanism: doors. Even if they're unlocked, closed doors tell most people not to enter unless invited by someone opening the door, or by a sign that tells them it's public. Why do you think most stores have doors that allow you to look into the store, that have obvious "open" signs, and that sometimes even open for you automatically? It's a way of telling people that the door is, unlike most other doors, not intended to keep them out.
URLs, however, are all designed the same way, there is no obvious difference between private and public resources. The only way to recognize them as private is to request them and see if a password request will show up. And experience suggests that most URLs are public.
Making it potentially illegal to try an URL will get you into the same legal problems as trying to make a difference between precise links ("deep links") and generic links (links to front pages).
Some of the questions you'd have to answer are:
I am a webmaster myself, and I do agree that there are some requests that are sent with obviously malicious intentions (e.g. requests for cmd.exe etc.). But I am also a web user, and I don't want browsing the web to become a legal risk simply because I know how URLs work and make use of that knowledge. Some web site operators seem to believe that simply because they intended their visitors to behave in a certain way, and didn't provide any means for the users to behave differently, that anything but what they expect you to do should be illegal.
There is a difference between an author telling you that it makes sense to read chapter four of his book before reading chapter five, and an author trying to put you in jail for reading chapter five first anyway.
if Intentia prevails, it would be very bad (Score:5, Insightful)
In some areas of law, it's unavoidable drawing fuzzy boundaries and considering intent. However, in this case, anybody who wants to protect their information on the web easily can, using standard web access control schemes; they don't need to rely on using obscure URLs. Let's not burden the courts with this.
This is part of a more general and disturbing trend, where lazy system admins don't spend the time set up their systems correctly, or management hires incompetent and cheap staff, and then try to use the court system and police (i.e., taxpayer money) to make up for their own shortcomings.