Hacker In Trouble With Feds After Tweeting About 'Playing' With Plane Comms Mid-Flight

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/17/hacker-tweets-about-hacking-plane-gets-computers-seized/

By Thomas Fox-Brewster
Forbes Staff
4/17/2015

What’s the first rule of flight club? No, it’s not “don’t talk about 
flight club”. The first rule is: do not tweet about hacking flight systems 
when using the on-board Wi-Fi. But pro hacker and founder of One World 
Labs, Chris Roberts, did just that on a trip from Denver to Syracuse 
yesterday. His tweet wouldn’t have made much sense to the average Twitter

https://twitter.com/Sidragon1/status/588433855184375808

Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start 
playing with EICAS messages? “PASS OXYGEN ON” Anyone ? :)

— Chris Roberts (@Sidragon1) April 15, 2015


But it made sense to US government officials, who evidently picked up on 
the references to on-board communications systems (the tweets did not 
refer to compromising flight control technologies). Rogers said when the 
flight landed, he was grabbed by FBI agents, questioned for four hours and 
when Rogers declined to hand over his computing equipment, they seized it 
all, including an iPad, a MacBook Pro, three hard drives, a flash drive 
and some USB sticks. He got to keep his phone.

All devices were encrypted, so the border control cops may have had a 
tough time getting anything useful from Roberts’ machines. He still hasn’t 
retrieved his toys and has not seen a warrant.

[...]

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