Second, we assign blame to the person that pulls the trigger, not the maker of the gun.
Third, these people are likely to never face any other form of punishment.
Personally, I think these facts justify this level of retribution. That doesn’t make it “legal” or “right”, but I definitely do not think it is “wrong”.
The analogy here is more akin to a booby trap than a gun, in which case we do assign the blame to the person that made the contraption intended to harm the unwitting user.
That aside, considering once it was discovered how the drive wiper that OP (aaza) claims to have made works, it basically just became a drive wiper that any bad actor could drop into a target system and run, “I intentionally distributed malware that I think, but have no way of verifying, only hurt The Wrong Sort Of People” isn’t just illegal and wrong, it’s stupid.
Imagine copying an entire binary onto a system just so you don't have to run `cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda`
Imagining script kiddies using stupid software in stupid ways very clearly and easily, also imagining a script kiddie pasting `cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda` into the windows command prompt of the computer he’s controlling with sub7 and getting very frustrated
Wow. Just wow.
I looked at keygens and whacked an entire site of 900+. Not a single one did not have a virus, and some more than one. I kept it as a zoo to test scannets.
Astalavesta baby.
someone does something bad -- by all means that gives whoever carte blanche to do whatever is just as bad or equally so to the victimizers.
This doesn't make sense -- even less sense when you realize that 'script kiddies' is anyone who ran an executable from an image board; you couldn't ask for a lower bar.
Half the people who downloaded the thing probably didn't even know what the fuck an IP address is, they probably shouldn't be the ones saddled with taking on the entirety of repercussion that was meant for the person(s) who wrote the tool.
tl;dr : I bet half of the '18,000' people were 11 year olds who typed 'google.com' or their least favorite AIM screen-name into the target criteria of this already half-assed 'tool', yet people act righteous for wiping their hard-drives as if they were the real culprit.
read : wiping the not-culprits parents hard-drives in many cases, I would bet.