FBI Pays Visit to Researcher Who Revealed Yahoo Hack
Jonathan Hall was trying to help the internet. Earlier this week, the 29-year-old hacker and security consultant revealed that someone had broken into machines running inside several widely used internet services, including Yahoo, WinZip, and Lycos. But he may have gone too far.
Hall—the president of a security firm called Future South Technologies—went out of his way to spotlight a network of compromised computer servers that, he says, are controlled by Romanian hackers. He published his findings on his blog, saying he simply wanted to help these companies clean up a nasty computer problem. But with his aggressive investigation, he may have run afoul of the nation’s anti-hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.
“I might wake up tomorrow in handcuffs,” says Hall, who was visited by the FBI on Tuesday.
