Hacker Journalists Expelled from Black Hat

Three journalists, representing the French Global Security Magazine, have been expelled from the hacker Black Hat conference, as CNet.news reports. The three went a bit too far with their hacking skills, as they broke into the LAN connection of the conference and extracted login information of other journalists.

The French journalists, as one of them, who is also the director of the magazine, admitted, wanted to play a practical joke on their colleagues, without meaning any harm. The thing is, journalists have no right to attempt to prove that the internal security of one network or another has flaws. Other professional categories, instead, must be allowed to interfere with computer security, as this can lead to a better evolution of the industry.

"Coders who explore technology through innovation and research play a vital role in developing and securing the software and hardware we use everyday. Yet this important work can be stymied by bogus legal threats," says Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick, regarding this recent matter. "EFF's Coders' Rights Project will provide a front-line defense for coders facing legal challenges for legitimate research activities."

In the case of the three journalists, who were immediately expelled and had their access to future conferences restricted, the violation of private information, such as IP addresses, usernames or passwords used to login to various websites, may imply an infringement upon legal stipulations.

Their conduct was not supported by the Wall of Sheep project, which is dedicated to displaying on a huge screen the personal information of the organizers and guests to a conference, obtained via wireless networks. Since the network that hosted the journalists' computers was wired, the three "hackers" shouldn't have even tried to get private information of their colleagues via this means. Another reason for which the reporters were banned was that the Wall of Sheep organizers tried to prove a point with the officials, and not to warn media (which basically cannot take any measures anyway) about the dangers of an unprotected connection.