http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/399602.html By Yuval Dror and Yuval Yoaz Haaretz Correspondents March 01, 2004 The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court acquitted Sunday an Israeli youth charged with attempting to hack the Web site of the Mossad secret service. Presiding judge Abraham Tennenbaum, who found that Avi Mizrahi had not attempted to break into the site, but had merely been attempting to assess the security level, even praised the defendant for "acting in the public good." "In a way," wrote Tennenbaum, "Internet surfers who check the vulnerabilities of Web sites are acting in the public good. If their intentions are not malicious and they do not cause any damage, they should even be praised," Tennenbaum wrote in his decision. Mizrahi was charged in June 2003 with attempting to hack the Mossad site. Mizrahi's attorney, Omri Kabiri, told Haaretz during the trial that his client sent his resume to the Mossad via a site set up by the secret service to recruit new employees. Thereafter, Mizrahi used an automatic program to check the level of security on the site to which he sent his resume. Mizrahi never revealed which program he used nor whether he knew that it checked the Internet server on which the site for known security holes. Prosecutors summoned an expert witness who claimed that Mizrahi's attack on the Web site showed the youth's expertise in Internet security. But the judge dismissed this argument in his ruling. "The defendant is far from being an expert on security or hacking, and doesn't even presume to be," Tennenbaum wrote. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo@private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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