Student Finds Flaws In Police Protocols, Gets Suspended Prison Sentence

When it comes to hacks, we have those who are black hat hackers who typically hack for personal gain. Then you have white hat hackers who hack for the greater good, like identifying exploits, loopholes, and vulnerabilities in hardware, software, systems, and etc. Sometimes these white hat hackers go on to receive rewards for discovering flaws.

Sometimes they also get in legal trouble, such as in this case of a 26-year old student at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security in Maribor, Slovenia when he discovered a flaw in the police communications protocol. The student in question, Dejan Ornig, discovered a flaw in the state-developed system and publicly disclosed the issues.

However his decision to go public only came about after he had inform the authorities but nothing had been done. In fact this is similar to Google’s Project Zero’s guidelines in which they will publicly disclose the flaw if companies do not respond to it in a timely manner. Now you might be thinking that the fact that he publicly disclosed it led to him getting in trouble, and you would be partially right.

He was also found to have tried to hack the network on 3 separate occasions and when the police conducted a search of his house, they found equipment that could intercept the police communications, and a fake police badge which they believe he wanted to use to impersonate a police officer. The semi-good news is that despite all of his, and his (possibly misguided) good intentions, Ornig has received a 15 month suspended prison sentence, and will not go to jail if he does not repeat his crime for at least the next 3 years.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Hack, Legal, Security