Teen pleads guilty in Microsoft and Valve hacking case A man from Indiana has pleaded guilty for his role in a hacking ring that targeted major games developers. Austin Alcala, 19, from the town of McCordsville, admitted guilt (PDF) to charges of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and criminal copyright infringement. Alcala will be sentenced on a July 29 hearing, where he …
Ah, so Microsoft is allowed to steal (excuse me, use underhanded tricks) to get stuff from others then extort unreasonable "licensing" fees from their users, but it's not OK to steal from Microsoft?
No, no, that's allright, I get how it works now, I just wasn't sure how a regular business worked, that's all.
The DOJ estimates that the business data, code and games the group pilfered from their targets added up to between $100m and $200m.
How did they come to this conclusion? The data was copied, not stolen. None of the companies involved lost anything. Nothing this group did cost those companies anything - one could even argue that they got free pen testing.
So where is this monetary figure coming from?
You've absolutely no idea what the cost to those companies may have been. Propriety and intellectual data has a value that can be completely lost if known to other parties. It doesn't have to be taken from the company.
You've no idea what motivated these hackers and what they intended to do with the data. You've also no idea what disruption they did in gaining access.
"None of the companies lost anything" is the totally wrong argument.
If there is some software that is sold for £1,000 and I make an illegal copy instead of buying it, that's a £1,000 loss. It's not legally theft, but it is morally quite the same.
However, the code that was stolen here doesn't have any value in itself. It is the copyright in the code that has value. If the CEO of Valve got drunk and signed over the copyrights of his source code to me, that would be a multi million dollar loss. Me having a copy of the source code, without any legitimate rights to it, has no value. I can't (legally) sell it to anyone. I can't make games for it.
Do we know what the hacking group actually did with the information?
Not that it really matters the US system seems to be based on spectacular vengeance and lawyers making money. The loss has probably been the cost of Microsoft's lawyers working out that there was $1's worth of IP loss. If I was the defence, I'd consider billing Microsoft for the Pen Test.
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