alt Hacker NewsWell, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
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Unfortunately we don't have to imagine
"In early October, Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department..."
"Yet despite the fact that officials within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initially wanted to thank Renaud for uncovering the flaw... [Governer] Parson labeled the reporter a hacker and called for criminal prosecution."
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-p...
The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.