If you put all your stuff on your front porch with a sign “please take what you want” and it’s all gone the next day - then you can’t say you were robbed.
I think this is a more apt analogy to what az16 did here
IMO these sorts of analogies to houses and porches don’t really work because there are just different cultural norms between websites and porches.
If there were a convention of leaving stuff on your porch to donate it, and a general assumption that when people left stuff on their porch it was up for grabs, somebody started storing their groceries there, and they were taken… they would just be stupid and not sympathetic.
If somebody just moved to a neighborhood where this was tradition and didn’t know about it, they would rightly be a little bit annoyed when the groceries they stored on their porch were taken, but really they only have themselves to blame for not understanding the local conventions.
If somebody opens up a storage company and then just put all the customers’ stuff on one of these porches, they are just dangerously, unethically incompetent. Even if there isn’t a convention of taking stuff from porches, actually. Because there are also armed gangs (nation-states) that go check out people’s porches for secrets.
There's no analog for the sign. You just put it in because without it your scenario still feels like theft (because it is) and you end up arguing against your own point.
Using those credentials is still a violation of the he CFAA, no reasonable person would think they were invited to access the systems protected by those credentials.
Yea, I'm sure the Russian/China/NK/Iran hackers are deeply afraid of the CFAA, you got them shaking dude (and vice versa when someone in the US hacks one of their sites).
The particular problem here is we think of the crime on the web in a civil/criminal manner... "People should just follow the law or be punished for a crime". This is not the internet. Regardless of what you think about the internet, it is an international war zone. If you leave the hatch of a tank open and a drone blows it up, that was you being stupid. If you leave an ammunition truck unguarded and the enemy takes it, again, that is you being stupid.
History will look back and say WWIII started on the web, but as of now it seems a huge number of people are in denial about it.
Do you cultivate vines with fruit, or do you cultivate brambles and eat thorns?
Remember white hats don't need to exist. Black hats will exist by the very nature they are parasitic and thrive where exploits exist. We can either have a community that warns you that "Hey, the stuff on your porch is going to get stolen" or we can have a community that calls their buddy when they see some stuff fresh for the taking.
A huge portion these discussions under this article are people arguing the minutia of a puddle in the lawn while a 10 meter high tsunami is rushing their way.
I think this is a more apt analogy to what az16 did here