UK Cybersecurity Executives Plead Guilty To Hacking A Rival Firm

An anonymous reader writes: "Five employees from cybersecurity firm Quadsys have admitted to hacking into a rival company's servers to allegedly steal customer data and pricing information," ZDNet is reporting. After a series of hearings, five top-ranking employees "admitted to obtaining unauthorised access to computer materials to facilitate the commission of an offence," including the company's owner, managing director, and account manager. Now they're facing 12 months in prison or fines, as well as additional charges, at their sentencing hearing in September. The headline at ZDNet gloats, "Not only did the Quadsys staff reportedly break into servers, they were caught doing it."

Story from friday?

[NotInHere]

Is this a dupe of the story from friday? https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

Or is it a follow-up?

Re:

[fustakrakich]

No, but when the editors tag a second story to the first, that one would fit here. Maybe they're more sensitive to the negative reaction that it provokes. I am bit surprised it isn't under "Related Links".

Security: You keep using that word...

[rmdingler]

It's not that I'd encourage my cyber security team to hack into a rival firm;

It's just that if they did, I'd expect them not to get caught.

Re: Security: You keep using that word...

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't the team though. The owner, director, and a manager shouldn't be hacking anything (because they're not talented enough). They likely tried because the actual team said no, that's illegal.

Re:

[lucm]

"Cyber security" is stretching things a bit, they're essentially some kind of GeekSquad and their "security" expertise is installing antivirus software.

The article title is misleading, I guess it creates more traffic than "small IT provider gets caught trying to hack the Google Drive of another small IT provider".

Re:

[sittingnut]

however he may have missed linking to related story posted recently.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
in fact, given the lack of details in that story, this may well be a further development same story.

Risk/benefits analysis failure

[Locke2005]

It seems like the costs of a lawsuit for anticompetitive behavior would far exceed any benefit derived from stealing a competitor's customer data. Also, shame on the competitor's IT department for allowing the company to be hacked in the first place.

Re:

[Cederic]

the incompetent buffoons who

..identified an attack, identified the people behind it and took out a competitor.

Given that perfect security is effectively impossible, I'll take that booby prize.