Gary McKinnon

[ChristianZS]

This morning on the beeb they were interviewing his ma' on the current mess they are now finding themselves in.

Should Nasa or the US Military have employed this bloke to help sort out the holes he exposed?

It just strikes me as silly not to. After all he must be pretty good, right?

[Marf]

ChristianZS said:

After all he must be pretty good, right?

Not really no, when you examine how he gained access to the systems its pretty basic stuff he did.

[dwilkie]

Plus he seems a total twunt. IIRC pretty much all he did was gain access to systems that weren't passworded - any monkey can (and, to be fair, should) fix that.

[Marf]

dwilkie said:

IIRC pretty much all he did was gain access to systems that weren't passworded - any monkey can (and, to be fair, should) fix that.

Yup, he got a list of NASA and military computers off the internet, installed PC Anywhere on his computer, punched in the addresses of these NASA/Mil computers and lo and behold got access to a logon screen.

NASA and the Military had made the most basic error of not adding an Administrator password so he gained access at an Admin level to the computers, then hopped around the network via "Network Neighbourhood".

What he did isnt beyond most people with a vague idea of how windows networking operates, which is why this whole debacle is such a embarrasment to the US.

To say he "hacked" into these systems gives him too much credit. He "lucked" into these systems.