It’s a bit of a vicious cycle: Greedy, bad actors taking advantage of the good times until good times end in bad times and a different set of greedy, bad actors start taking advantage of the bad times—and there goes a little more faith in humanity.
When the press and the security industry weren’t obsessed with the non-event of the Conficker.C worm, warnings went out about laid-off employee sabotage and theft, spam targeting the financially concerned and technological clueless. Today’s stern warning is about industrial espionage.
Graham Cluley
But it’s not Giant Company A spying on Giant Company B. Today’s bad apples come from a small town in North Carolina, where rival hacking has unexpectedly come to roost.
One thing missing (among other essential facts) from this Richmond County Daily Journal report is exactly how local police knew three RE/MAX realtors had hacked into a rival realtor’s Hotmail account. The target, Exit Realty’s Nicole Hayden, didn’t say it was the police who informed her—only that they did their job. We’ll assume the local police weren’t monitoring accounts under Patriot Act orders and give credit to an anonymous tipster.
The police served three arrest warrants to RE/MAX employees accused of accessing Hayden’s computer illegally between March 1 and March 20. Usually when one thinks of hackers, domestic and foreign teenagers hired by shadowy entities come to mind immediately—not three small town realtors trying to get an edge on the local competition.
“As competition gets stiffer and we see more firms struggling during the credit crunch we shouldn’t be surprised if we see workers in some firms break the law to keep their necks above water,” writes security firm Sophos’ Graham Cluley.
“What people need to realise is that unauthorised access of someone else’s computer system is a crime, and can carry stiff penalties. It may feel quite different to type in someone else’s username and password into a PC than to break into an office in the dead of night to rifle through their filing cabinets, but it’s still against the law.”
