Questions tagged [hacking]
Non-normative tag for questions relating to the use of information technology, typically in unintended manners.
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Is it legal for BMW owners to enable heated car seats without paying the subscription fee?
Its been recently reported that:
BMW is now selling subscriptions for heated seats in a number of
countries — the latest example of the company’s adoption of
microtransactions for high-end car ...
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Is it legal to hack a hacker back (in the US)?
I was wondering if it's legal to do what most people call a "hack back." Suppose someone tricked you into downloading software onto your computer that was designed to steal your data, but it ...
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What parts of cracking (tampering with the copyrighted software) are actually illegal?
I would like to know whether software cracking is considered illegal broadly (in the way that drugs are, for example, broadly illegal in many western countries), or is it a more complex question. I am ...
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Is it legal to reverse engineer Web APIs used by websites?
The library in my town has a Web site that allows you to check books out online and pick them up at the library. I would like to write a custom program to do this from the command line on my computer. ...
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Under what circumstances could laying hacker "traps" cause civil or criminal liability for non-law enforcement civilians?
The answer to If a hacker is infected as a result of their actions, is the victim liable? that explained laying a trap to injure someone could go either way depending on the severity of the injury and ...
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Have draft SCOTUS opinions been leaked before?
A draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson has been leaked. Cathi Herrod of the Center for Arizona Policy has claimed:
It is totally unprecedented for a draft opinion to be leaked.
Is it unprecedented, or ...
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Would a botnet be illegal, even if the terms of service state everything it will be used for (assumming that all uses will be legal) [closed]
Basically the title. Will a botnet be illegal, even if users consent to everything the botnet will do, and everything the botnet does is legal? (In the US, Colorado)
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Is it legal to cheat in single player games with no in-app purchases?
I had a single player free-to-play (gratis, but not libre) game on my phone a couple years ago. It has no in-app purchases; AFAICT it's completely funded by ads. One feature of it is that you can get ...
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Malicious actions by individual moderators
This is a follow up on a previous question.
Using Stack Exchange as a example, moderators should be able to destroy the site within minutes by automated means. There is no meaningful terms of service.
...
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Legality of Avast Vulnerability Scanning on Networks
I observed behavior from certain Avast security products, where the products will scan other computers/devices in an internal network for security vulnerabilities.
I noticed that the behavior from ...
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Legal implications of using corporate infrastruture in cyber attacks against Russia [closed]
Recently, our data centers have been migrated from Ukraine to central Europe. Instead of shutting down, we intend to dedicate the infrastructure to launching cyber attacks against Russian state ...
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International Cybercrime Based in China. Who's Jurisdiction is it?
Quick question... I got my crypto wallet hacked. I live in Canada. Offender lives in China. After the theft, he deposited the money into Huobi, whose HQ is also in China. I did some preliminary ...
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Can it be illegal to press f12 in a web browser?
There is a case in the news where a journalist identified a security issue in the web site of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that exposed 100,000 social security numbers....
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Suppose you were hacked and harassed using the data stolen
Theoretical situation for a cybersecurity course discussion (something of a table-top game):
Suppose you are researching a politically controversial topic and someone hacks your computer and starts ...
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Is it legal to publish free offline cheats and at the same time have a Patreon for donations?
I am a person who like to do a lot of things for living. I was wondering of releasing offline cheats for free with a Patreon for donations ONLY. Is it illegal to do that or legal? I really need a ...
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Liability for damages in the U.S. for finding and disclosing "0-day" computer exploit
In the IT/Programming security world, usually people contact the vendor/owner of a particular software if they find a bug or security vulnerability and give them time to patch it before releasing the ...
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Is it legal to hijack online scammers accounts?
If someone were to start phishing scammers, hijacking their accounts and handing them over to the FBI, is there any protection for said vigilante?
I think there is some precedence for the necessity ...
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Under US law, is it illegal to write a self propagating computer worm
Suppose a person creates a self-propagating computer worm that:
does not modify or delete any of the victim's files
rather displays a funny message to the user
scans other computers and spreads ...
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Legal status of Cellebrite hack
The CEO of Signal has posted the discovery of security vulnerabilities in Cellebrite products. These products are used by police to evade security on seized mobile devices and thereby download the ...
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Game Hacking Legality [closed]
Hello I have a question about if game hacking is legal in Florida. What I mean by game hacking is making a software and selling it (not altering the games original code or selling anything with the ...
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Can Law Enforcement in the US use evidence acquired through an illegal act by someone else?
There are reports on the internet this morning that a group of people were able to hack Parler and download around 70tb of data from the servers before AWS ceased hosting the platform. There are ...
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Are publicly available password dumps legal under GDPR
When a company gets breached by hackers, often the contents of their databases will make its way onto the internet. Sometimes this will include obviously personal information such as email contents or ...
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Publishing research obtained by violating Google's TC
I believe Google's Terms and Conditions prohibit bot scraping: that is, submitting lots of (automated) search queries in a short time.
This is enforced by mechanisms such as CAPTCHAs and IP ...
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Is using proxies to circumvent rate limit to scrape data legal in India?
I'm in India, and this is what the Indian Information Act of 2000/66F says on the matter:
Indian Information Act 2000/66F
Punishment for cyber terrorism.– Whoever,– with intent to threaten the unity, ...
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Is there any country where hacking back is legal?
Building on this unanswered question: Under what circumstances could laying hacker "traps" cause civil or criminal liability for non-law enforcement civilians?
I was wondering if there was ...
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Can I use a workaround I developed to bypass the internet filter at work?
I found a workaround (by writing some code) to bypass the internet filter at work.
Is that considered hacking? Or perhaps violating the company's rules.
Am I the one to be blamed for finding a ...
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Is unintentional one-time bug abuse illegal?
Concrete examples :
Someone making API requests through a banking platform, withdrew many times in succession, and through some miracle bug they all went through.
Someone unaffiliated with a ...
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What happens after bugs are found in a private residence? [closed]
I have evidence of being spied on by complete nobodies and weirdly threatened malicious people on the web so I have a bug sweep coming up. What should I do after the technician finds hidden cameras ...
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Which kind of lawyer does a hacking and spying victim need? [closed]
In the event that someone hacks your devices in order to let people on the internet spy on you every day, which kind of lawyer do you need to attack the situation? Based on what's being done and how ...
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Is it illegal to refuse to fix a hacked website?
Suppose there's a website or a server that has been hacked. There is no personal data stored anywhere, so there hasn't been a real data breach, because basically there's no valuable data to steal at ...
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If a hacker is infected as a result of their actions, is the victim liable?
If a hacker gained unauthorized access to a computer network, downloaded a virus that was on a computer and infected their own system, would the victim of the hacker be liable for damages?
Does it ...
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Is CNN Chris Cuomo right about Clinton's emails: "it's different for the media"?
In 2016, CNN reporter Chris Cuomo, said about Hillary Clinton's hacked emails:
Also interesting is remember...it's illegal to possess the stolen documents. It's different for the media. So ...
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how much would a hacker be fined for using others online money?
how much would a hacker be fined for using others online money? (according to international law)
Let's say for using $10,000, $1,000, $100, or $10.
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How can I safely provide a free online service?
I am developing a website for secure sharing credentials. Similar to https://www.cloak.sh/ .
How can I protect myself and hopefully eliminate all my liability, while still providing a service "...
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Is it legal to sell cracked gaming accounts?
A coworker recently said they have a small side business in which they were selling cracked gaming accounts.
Is this legal?
It sounds very illegal, but I haven’t found anything definitive on Reddit ...
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If a website receive an attack by an Hacker, who is evanutally liable for the data breach?
I'm trying to create a very general example, i know there are surely hundreds of variables that must be analyzed but even just some general considerations from who had some experience can be useful ...
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Is it legal to crack MD5 hashes?
I saw a website that involves programming problems. One problem asks to write a program that finds a string whose MD5 hash is given.
Is it criminal to crack the MD5 hash by finding those strings?
CommunityBot
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Can I get in trouble for someone else using my code for bad?
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but oh well. I wrote some proof of concept code that can do stuff to computers on my school network if the user has admin privileges. If I publish ...
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How to respond to a user requesting deletion of their online account
My website occasionally receives requests from users asking for their account to be deleted. The website itself is a dating site that stores messages between users, personal information they add to ...
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Legality of Cyber Attack on illegal foreign website
I live in a country where website that provides pornography, illegal drugs, prostitution, illegal gambling, etc are forbidden (in Indonesia). But foreign websites (ex. from western countries) on those ...
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Is it legal to disclose a technical vulnerability publicly that might cause a monetary loss to millions of people?
I'll cite an example that came to my mind to crisply explain the essence of my question. It might contain some extreme assumptions not rooted in real world examples.
Computer scientist John Doe who ...
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Are we legally liable for negligence if a breach in a 3rd party happens due to us giving extra visibility to a vulnerable system?
TL;DR - Found a dangling DNS record that was pointing to an IP address we don't own, the server found on that IP address was running a vulnerable piece of software. Wondering if attackers found & ...
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Would it be legal to change the functionality of your own software to do something apparently malicious if fullly documented?
This topic came up when discussing the infamous left-pad disaster from awhile back. To give a brief summary the author of a small package hosted on the npm repository that numerous other packages had ...
CommunityBot
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Am I liable for problems caused by unendorsed software modification on my products?
Imagine the following hypothetical.
My firm produces electronic controllers for a variety of products. Let's focus, say, on a commercial washing machine.
We design the electronics and develop the ...
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Is selling IOS game hacks illegal through some platform?
so basically we have a website and we sell monthly subscriptions. The website has a lot of different game hacks and some tutorials for hacking. So, the question is, is this completely illegal? because ...
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Can a hacker be arrested without investigating his computer?
So I would first like to state I'm not asking this because I'm trying to find out how much evidence it would take for law enforcement to arrest me (I'm not a hacker).
From what I've gathered, law ...
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When is a permission required to attack a system?
Never attack something you don't have a permission for!
This is one of the golden rules of penetration testing, yet it's surprisingly unclear. What exactly counts as an attack, and when do I need ...
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Is it illegal to hack twitter accounts and websites belonging to ISIS?
In particular, ISIS twitter accounts, networks, and propaganda sites.
Would the US government condone such cybercrime? Would they even encourage people to try? I have heard stories of ISIS defaming ...
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Bypassing website's paywall by modifying HTTP request headers
Recently I see some debates about bypassing paywalls by modifying browser's HTTP request as stated on ghack.
Most paywalled websites allow users to read a certain number of free articles before ...
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Is reverse engineering for research legal?
I want to look at the code of a certain app, without modifying it. Is that fine accordingly to EU laws ? Btw, sorry if I posted this in the wrong place.
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