January 29, 2002

6:47 PM

Washtech.com hackedThe Washington Post's tech site was hacked yesterday. Here's the text (via FuckedCompany) that appeared after the hack and before the WaPo crew shut the site down. As of tonight, it is still not back up at its own domain. Not sure why this gives me glee. I just wish one day someone could hack something and leave something profound in the way of a message.
posted by brookish (6 comments total)

This is the fuckedcompany link brookish intended, i believe.

Also, the cracker irc channel mentioned, has plenty of other sites at the alldas defacement archive.

FWIW, these things aren't really much in the way of news. Admin neglects to update to latest patches (this goes for windows or *nix), some hacker published info about an exploit, someone writes a script on the exploit, and a bunch of script kiddies run the script and think they are 'leet when they deface something. See the rest of the alldas.de site for the dozens of site defaced every day. One day the admins will get on the ball, lesson learned for them.
posted by malphigian at 7:40 PM on January 29, 2002

Not sure why this would give you (anyone) glee either. And that's not meant to be snarky ... I just don't understand when people get joy out of this sort of vandalism.

I like to have as much 'fun' as the next person, but hacking sites with the ("we're just good guys, really!") explanation that they're trying to help point out security flaws is pretty lame in my opinion. Wanna help? Send a friggin' email and be done with it, thanks.

As far as finding a profound message on a hacked site? Well, you know what they say about a cold day in hell...
posted by cyniczny at 7:40 PM on January 29, 2002

cyniczy has it right - there are no profound messages posted by hackers on the sites they deface because they aren't a very profound bunch.
posted by schlyer at 10:43 PM on January 29, 2002

Any idea what they exploited to get in?
posted by ph00dz at 6:59 AM on January 30, 2002

I smell Nimda, getting in via an administrator's desktop. But who knows, really? There are so many options. These guys just got behind the curve on patches or something.
posted by dhartung at 7:14 AM on January 30, 2002

I really hate those hackers. We had a problem with them on one of the sites we're running (let's just say my employer manages to get a lot of people pissed off) and had weeks of work lost...
posted by Adman at 3:28 PM on January 30, 2002