Is 30 Months in Prison Too Harsh For Hacking A Website?

Mitchell Frost’s cyber pranks have cost him. The 23-year-old University of Akron student plead guilty Wednesday to hacking Bill O’ Rielly’s website. That stunt alone cost him $40,000, 30 months of his life in jail, and three years of supervised release, according to MSNBC.

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Frost worked as a hacker between August 2006 and March 2007 while a student at the Ohio university. He attached O’Reilly’s site five times using a botnet hosted on the school’s network. He also admitted that he hacked into Ann Coulter’s and one of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign websites as well, for which he has to pay $10,000 back to his university.

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His case echoes David Kernell’s, the college student who is accused of hacking Sarah Palin’s email. Although Kernell has yet to be sentenced, the local Knoxville News Sentinel estimates he will receive 15 to 21 months in jail.

Does the punishment befit the crime? While hacking is a serious offense, are these cyber crimes worth of this much jail time and money?

http://murtwitnessonelive.wordpress.com murtwitnessonelive

30 months is NOT ENOUGH. His sentence should be in YEARS, not months. He had the bad luck to hack the pages of Celebrities.

The hacker group that has hacked into all of my internet sites were fortunate enough to choose someone who is not famous and does not have the resources to go after them….legally.

I have been ruined both personally and financially. I have lost my business, am about to loose my home. The hackers have ruined my reputation and implicated me in a capitol murder case involving a 3 year old child.

I have been falsely been accused of being a pedophile and worse.

The people behind all of this even brag about their deeds saying that they were “doing the right thing.”

The worst part of all of this is these are not young geeks (or at least not all of them) and computer experts, but mothers and grandmothers.

If you are being hacked and cyber bullied and are an ordinary adult, you are doomed. The press, the law, and the public do not care. You are doomed.

MURT
http://ndkphotoblog.wordpress.com ndking

Having fallen prey to this type of low life vandalism and had literally years of work wiped out, i don’t think the sentences are harsh enough to make the level of ‘object lesson’ that needs to be made to these morons that this sort of wanton destruction is not acceptable. All of the hacked sites noted were from the political right which implies a political underpinning to these specific attacks. if the hackers do not believe in the open exchange of ideas and free speech they need to find a home more to their liking. My site is not political in the least but was a resource to students so the attack was simply childishly malicious. if one has no respect for the work of others then they deserve none for themselves: let their behavior determine the rights of others they see as valuable and therefore deserve for themselves.
chimparzan

Any act of vandalism cyber or physical is soul crushing, I worked my ass of as a kid to restore my first car just to have somebody key the side 3 days after restoring the paint job. I have never had a website to be hacked but I assume you get the same feeling. It just sucks. The worst part is you dont know who did it, it usually seems like random idiocy by some one who dosnt really care about all the stress and not to mention monetary costs on your end.
cyberprivateer

30 months is not enough, IMHO. My servers are getting attacked daily by China (see a list of China attack server IP addresses on my blog at http://www.themorgandoctrine.com/2010/11/ip-addresses-of-chinese-attack-servers.html). But at least we ought to be able to fight back when our systems are attacked, and right now US cybercrime law is just plain silly.
http://myexplorationofchristianity.wordpress.com myexplorationofchristianity

*All* website hacking is preventable. It is one thing to hack a website and make the statement, “I just proved your security is bad – this is how you should fix it” and “I just ruined your life/business.” If there is no personal/financial damage done, then months in jail will be good. However, if there is damage done that is irreversible, jail time should be in terms of years instead of months. I don’t think paying a fine is particularly relevant unless there was financial damage done, but I suppose financial damage can be caused by the cost of going to court.
It is possible to block ip addresses that are doing multiple attacks via .htaccess files (or equivalent access restriction). You can also take their ip address and find their ISP (Internet Service Provider) [using tools like geoip, and whois] and report the incident to their ISP. Most ISP takes things like hacking attempts very seriously.