Mahalo Employs Botnet Criminal

An employee in Mahalo's IT department, John Schiefer, has been sentenced to 4 years in prison for launching a botnet attack. He was charged and agreed to plead guilty back in 2007. In the meantime, he got a job at Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has posted tweeted several times about the incident). What it pretty much comes down to is that Calacanis feels that he is a good judge of character and he thinks Schiefer was just a dumb kid when he launched the (failed) attack and has seen the error of his ways.

Calacanis also wants to assure users that their information is not in any danger. "John’s work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don’t store any sensitive data anyway (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answers–not much damage can be done there since they’re all public anyway)," he says.

Even if nobody's data is in danger, this incident is likely going to leave a large bruise on the trust and credibility of Mahalo. The fact that he's keeping him on as an employee up until his incarceration won't help this. Calacanis defends the company’s decisions to the end though, and is well aware of the backlash the fiasco is likely to bring upon him and his company.