Judge William Alsup may not be familiar to most people. His name is familiar to me through a show I used to listen to called This Week in Law. This show was available on the Twit Network but has since been discontinued when I mentioned I had listened to it to someone.
This judge is one of the good ones, because he really understands technology, and when he questions something, there usually is a good reason.
Through the trial, Alsup has questioned the government’s evidence against Nikulin. In March, after prosecutors questioned a witness about how Nikulin allegedly
accessed stolen usernames and passwords to infiltrate the Formspring site, Alsup told prosecutors
they risked boring the jury with “excruciating detail that seems irrelevant.” He went on to wonder whether the Department of Justice “had some magic witness”
who would provide a smoking gun.
He’s not wrong in his thinking. The suspect, Russian Yevgeniy Nikulin , is accused of hacking in to sites like Linked in, Dropbox and Formspring. The alleged amount of data taken was 117 million usernames and passwords. This would be the largest breach for that time for an online web site, but as we know, the data is much more lucritive now with the recent breaches at health care facilities and e-comerce web sites.
What was Form Spring?
Formspring no longer exists, but it allowed people to ask questions of users without having those questioning people logged in. The company behind this site closed its doors in 2013 after failures dealing with the legal challenges of the apparent breach.
I remember seeing questions posted on twitter through my followers list but I personally never participated in the site. The site started in 2009 by two people, Ade Olonoh and John Wechsler. According to the linked site they had between 11 and 50 people working for the company.
What took down the site besides the legal problems dealing with the breach was the potential for cyberbullying in which several teenagers committed suicide after being bullied on the site.
This is not the first site that has caused suicides through the years because of cyberbullying, but it may be the first. Forums in general bring out the bad people, and we need to be careful.
Besides Form Spring which I’ve covered in the above section, dropbox was mentioned. I don’t remember getting notified about this back then and I believe I was a dropbox member. I didn’t get on Linkedin until well after these breaches.
There is more to this story including the suspect’s alleged involvement with other Russian people who have hacked the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) among other linked material. Cyberscoop has the entire scoop on this one: Judge in trial of alleged LinkedIn hacker admits doubt in evidence is the article and you be the judge!
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