Three Blind Phreaks, See How They Scam ... The Badirs pulled off Mamet-worthy phone cons, employing cell phones, Braille-display computers, ace code-writing skills, and an uncanny ability to impersonate anyone from corporate suits to sex-starved females. On the phone, the brothers morph into verbal 007s, intimidating men, seducing women, and wheedling classified information from steely-voiced security personnel [...] An intense cat-and-mouse game developed: the Badirs on one side, with fraud investigator David Osmo and prosecutor Doron Porat on the other [...] his car's GPS system and email were repeatedly hacked. "There was a message waiting for him with his password in it," says Ramy, sounding quite pleased. "After that, he changed his password every hour before giving up on email altogether and using a typewriter."
posted by Blue Stone
on Jan 30, 2004 -
7 comments
Court of Appeals upholds ban against DeCSS. More significant than the banning of DVD cracking is the edict directed towards 2600, which has been forbidden to post any links related to DeCSS. My concern with this decision is whether the current decision may be interpreted in a broader context, preventing others from linking to sites that aren't as sexy as Mom and Apple Pie to the powers that be. Maybe I'm overreacting. But could we see bloggers forced to remove certain links and led to the Tombs if they refuse? Discuss.
posted by ed
on Nov 28, 2001 -
15 comments
How to anonymously get root access on a quarter million machines overnight In the past 24 hours the CodeRed II worm has been infecting IIS web servers with a speed equal to or greater than that of the original CodeRed. The original CodeRed infected what is thought to be all vulnerable machines, approximately 250,000 hosts, in under 24 hours.
While CodeRed I was relatively harmless, CodeRed II installs a full Administrator-access back door shell that can be accessed via HTTP. This creates a very interesting situation, and with the techniques discussed in this paper opens a new potential door for mass system cracking.
posted by lagado
on Aug 5, 2001 -
13 comments
You too can be a felon! Last year, the SDMI Foundation made a
public challenge to see if
anyone could crack 6 proposed protection mechanisms for digitally-encoded music. All six turned out to be feeble and all six fell. Since then, the SDMI Foundation has been relying on lawyers to cover up for the incompetence of their engineers. They're trying to suppress this article, so everyone reading this has a duty to make and store a copy of it. (Everyone should also own at least one copy of DeCSS. I have the 442-character C version printed on the back of my personal card.)
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Apr 21, 2001 -
15 comments
Government hacking abound! I hate it when a group of kids do a big .gov and .mil defacement. Then all the other kids start puffing themselves up and try to outdo each other. S'cuse me while I break out my virtual lawnchair... and please pass the mint julep.
posted by bkdelong
on Jan 19, 2001 -
3 comments
Last night
Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is
quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
1 comment
Kevin Mittnick is finally being released from prison today, but I wouldn't call what he's getting as being "free". Prohibiting Kevin from touching a computer for 3 years? This isn't like giving a toddler to a ex-con child molester, it's a computer. A person can do a lot of things besides hack into company servers. How does anyone expect Kevin to make the $125 restitution he owes each month, if he can't use a computer or get a job that requires a computer? Now that I think about it, what percentage of decent jobs are completely free of computers?
posted by mathowie
on Jan 21, 2000 -
5 comments
If you had problems reaching MetaFilter over the weekend,
this is why. Some script kiddies launched some gnarly smurf attacks against the regional ISP that provides bandwidth for this site. Oh well, it gave me time to code. I've added lots of little enhancements (like user pages, a working search engine), but still have to get the archives working and expand the preferences page.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 19, 2000 -
0 comments
