arstechnica.com - Ars Technica
Dan Goodin – 29 janv. 2026 19:30

Settlement comes more than 6 years after Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn's ordeal began.

Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.

The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.

The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.

A chilling message
The event galvanized security and law enforcement professionals. Despite the legitimacy of the work and the legal contract that authorized it, DeMercurio and Wynn were arrested on charges of felony third-degree burglary and spent 20 hours in jail, until they were released on $100,000 bail ($50,000 for each). The charges were later reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges, but even then, Chad Leonard, sheriff of Dallas County, where the courthouse was located, continued to allege publicly that the men had acted illegally and should be prosecuted.

Reputational hits from these sorts of events can be fatal to a security professional’s career. And of course, the prospect of being jailed for performing authorized security assessment is enough to get the attention of any penetration tester, not to mention the customers that hire them.

“This incident didn’t make anyone safer,” Wynn said in a statement. “It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping [a] government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it.”

DeMercurio and Wynn’s engagement at the Dallas County Courthouse on September 11, 2019, had been routine. A little after midnight, after finding a side door to the courthouse unlocked, the men closed it and let it lock. They then slipped a makeshift tool through a crack in the door and tripped the locking mechanism. After gaining entry, the pentesters tripped an alarm alerting authorities.

Within minutes, deputies arrived and confronted the two intruders. DeMercurio and Wynn produced an authorization letter—known as a “get out of jail free card” in pen-testing circles. After a deputy called one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter and got confirmation it was legit, the deputies said they were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building. DeMercurio and Wynn spent the next 10 or 20 minutes telling what their attorney in a court document called “war stories” to deputies who had asked about the type of work they do.

When Sheriff Leonard arrived, the tone suddenly changed. He said the Dallas County Courthouse was under his jurisdiction and he hadn’t authorized any such intrusion. Leonard had the men arrested, and in the days and weeks to come, he made numerous remarks alleging the men violated the law. A couple months after the incident, he told me that surveillance video from that night showed “they were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony” when deputies were responding. I published a much more detailed account of the event here. Eventually, all charges were dismissed.

DeMercurio and Wynn sued Dallas County and Leonard for false arrest, abuse of process, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and malicious prosecution. The case dragged on for years. Last Thursday, five days before a trial was scheduled to begin in the case, Dallas County officials agreed to pay $600,000 to settle the case.

It’s hard to overstate the financial, emotional, and professional stresses that result when someone is locked up and repeatedly accused of criminal activity for performing authorized work that’s clearly in the public interest. DeMercurio has now started his own firm, Kaiju Security.

“The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest,” DeMercurio said. “What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building.”

• In this post, we describe our in-depth investigation into a threat actor to which we have assigned the identifier MUT-1244.
• MUT-1224 uses two initial access vectors to compromise their victims, both leveraging the same second-stage payload: a *phishing campaign targeting thousands of academic researchers and a large number of trojanized GitHub repositories, such as proof-of-concept code for exploiting known CVEs.
• Over 390,000 credentials, believed to be for WordPress accounts, have been exfiltrated to the threat actor through the malicious code in the trojanized "yawpp" GitHub project, masquerading as a WordPress credentials checker.
• Hundreds of victims of MUT-1244 were and are still being compromised. Victims are believed to be offensive actors—including pentesters and security researchers, as well as malicious threat actors— and had sensitive data such as SSH private keys and AWS access keys exfiltrated.
• We assess that MUT-1244 has overlap with a campaign tracked in previous research reported on the malicious npm package 0xengine/xmlrpc and the malicious GitHub repository hpc20235/yawpp.