Mahalo defends employee with botnet mastermind past

March 7, 6:16 PMLA Internet ExaminerTimothy Nichols

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Online media sources ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Computerworld to The Associated Press have been burning up the cyber waves talking about a Mahalo employee, John Schiefer, being sentenced to four years in jail for past botnet, hacking, fraud and wiretapping activities. What's ironic is that Schiefer was hired by Mahalo as a security consultant, which in many ways makes sense being that when a person can crack security they also have a handle on what's required to prevent security breaching. Mahalo is Los Angeles, CA based startup company that offers a human powered search engine and is founded by Silicon Valley veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Mahalo's CEO Jason Calacanis took an interesting and surprising stance, one that I must say I personally agree with. Calacanis, who was present in court for Schiefer's sentencing, was quoted as saying he's, "happy we’ve kept him on board" and "I consider myself a fairly decent judge of character, and after spending months with John, I’m convinced he was an angry stupid kid when he launched his botnet attack (which did .000000001% of the damage it could have). Now he’s an adult who just wants to make a decent living, spend time with his significant other and breathe the clean air off the Pacific Ocean by our offices in Santa Monica.”

Despite the almost humorous concept that Santa Monica, CA has clean air Calacanis did a great job making his opinion known and sticking up for Schiefer. Sentencing a mis-guided but obviously technically talented person to sit and waste time in a jail cell seems a little bit ridiculous. Yes, Schiefer broke the law, yes what he did was wrong, but lets put the young man to work, lets assign him to useful tasks to help exploit his talents and improve technically related security holes that he obviously knows a thing or two about. Sometimes it seems as if we are too quick to overly punish those who are already self reformed while allowing other criminals go under punished. I hope that Mahalo is around when Schierfer gets out of jail and Calacanis is still just as supportive and hires him back immediately.