A kid showed up a bunch of big names. That's the equivalent of a kid walking into a bank and somehow making it into the vault, alerting security to the fact that it's possible without actually making off with all of the gold. That's on the bank, not on the kid. Nobody came into your house or stole your property. If they had the police likely wouldn't show up, nor would the case make the newspaper even if - hah, as if that happens - they made an arrest.
The only reason you are hearing about this is because someone at 'bigcorp' didn't want to accept responsibility for their fuckups, and so they used the law to come down on some kid which effectively did them a service, which costs society a large pile of money, further externalizing the cost of their fuckup.
This is the key difference. The comment I was replying to implied that the transaction was actually completed, or at least I thought it did.
If the guy[0] didn't indeed actually benefit from the vulnerability then that is a very different story, and I don't think he should be arrested in that case.
0: not "kid" -- he is 18 which I assume is above the age of criminal responsibility in Hungary.
The kid purposely changed the price of a service to lower it to an insignificant fraction (reportedly from ~27£ to ~0.15£).
If that same kid went around a supermarket replacing price tags to lower the selling price, would you call it "showing up a bunch of big names"?
Say what you may about how broken and buggy the system was. Purposely misusing it for financial advantage is still a no-no.
Here's a better article: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/hungarian-hacker-arrested-... - it seems like this was good faith security research (he disclosed the issue after testing it) and he couldn't use the transport pass he "stole" because he didn't even live in their service area anyway.
This arrest had nothing to do with stealing and all to do with putting well-connected, incompetent people in a very uncomfortable position.
Then you took their money and gave them the item without saying anything.
Would seem like a weird situation but I don’t see how its theft.
