The difference between Victor Faur and Gary McKinnon

Clu-blog reader Lucian has been in touch following the entry I posted this weekend suggesting that there had been inconsistency in the treatment meted out to NASA hackers Gary McKinnon and Victor Faur.

McKinnon, a Brit, is facing extradition to the United States after hacking into NASA and Pentagon computers shortly after September 2001.

Faur, a computer programmer who hacked into NASA, US Navy and Department of Energy computers between 2005 and 2006, has not faced extradition proceedings and was given a suspended sentence and a fine in Romania last week.

Lucian has been kind enough to go into detail about the apparent discrepancy:

The reason why U.S. did not push for extradition is not because they did not want to, but because they couldn’t. At the time of…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.