alt Hacker NewsI feel like when I was a twenty- something I would have been at risk of exfiltrating data like this not for any specific nefarious purpose or money-making scheme but just out of data hoarding.
Anymore I have zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device. Nope, never gonna need it, don't want it, just a potential legal headache with no upside.
But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself. It'd make me feel special, having information no one else had.
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So like Harold T. Martin who took 50 terabytes of data from the NSA because he was a data hoarder and was sentenced to nine years in prison?
> zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device
Same. I won't even have Teams or Authenticator on my phone unlike most others here (though wrt Teams, that is at least as much about not wanting work to bother me as it is about the danger of data seepage). I need the authenticator to do the job, but I have an old factory-reset phone that has that (and, just in case, Teams) on it.
> But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself.
I'm pretty sure I never would have done. I've always resisted knowing credentials and personal information that aren't mine (so if anything untoward happens with/using that information there is no way it can be my fault/doing, as well as the less selfish reasons) despite people falling over themselves to do things like tell me their passwords & such when they were wanting some for of tech support.
But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information (and all too often information about their friends & family), do the idea that data is a free-for-all is dangerously normalised in their heads.
I find older people are similarly very lax with their own data, in fact often being rather too trusting of others generally, but not so much with other peoples. There are a lot more people who are appropriately careful (or even paranoid) in their 30s/40s/50s (I'm late 40s myself) - I think we are lucky to be in the middle, being exposed to information dangers enough to not have that “naivety or age” and not desensitised by having lax information security pushed at us from an early age.
Even in your twenties would you have then taken that data and attempted to share it with a future employee?
I don't think you deserve downvotes; I think it's totally plausible that some people would steal this data just to feel special.
But:
1) That's why we have traditionally had the safeguards that we have had, to protect against this sort of crime, and
2) The allegation in this case is that he later approached coworkers to do something with this data, even if they ultimately didn't help him do it. So it doesn't appear to be hoarding just for the sake of it here.
And further, I would absolutely leverage it to get myself a job.
Oh, wait. No I would never have done that. That's just insane.
> having information no one else had
A broken logic. Of course the people who you would have stolen the data from, had it. A question pops up, though... what's in your possession you should not be in the possession of.
It may not have been your intent, but this comment seems to downplay the crime here. It's a crime to take the data even if he wasn't shopping it around as alleged. and the fact that he was 'young and stupid' makes the circumstances of how this happened much more important for an investigation by the IG (ie why was an immature person given so much power?)