An attempted password crack was enough for a U.S. indictment against Julian Assange
The U.S. government unsealed an indictment Thursday charging Julian Assange with a single count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for allegedly agreeing to help crack a password on a protected U.S. government computer.
Legal experts who spoke with CyberScoop said Assange didn’t actually have to directly hack anything to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which was enacted in 1984 to prohibit unauthorized access to a computer system. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in March 2010 was engaged in a conspiracy with former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning to access and publish classified material stolen from U.S. government networks, the indictment says.
By actively participating in the collection of data from a protected government network, rather than receiving it from a source after the collection — as journalists typically do — Assange is legally liable, according to prosecutors.
After Manning provided Assange with “hundreds of thousands” of government files, Assange “agreed to assist” Manning find more material by unlocking a password that was protected in a hash value, according to the Department of Justice. The hashing process involves scrambling a password into a string of other characters, though hackers in the past have demonstrated ways to defeat that protection.
