I was a Teenage Wares Freak? San Diego Republican Party chairman Tony Krvaric may have been Strider, co-founder of Fairlight. via Slashdot
posted by Artw on May 6, 2008 - 57 comments

RainbowCrack Online aims to enable anyone (who'll pay their subscription) to crack a password given the password hash, and get the clear-text password back instantly by looking it up against their 500GB Rainbow Table. Of course, you've been able to use John the Ripper or l0phtcrack to do this using your own computational power (and time) to crack a password before (or do it online) but now it's just Click and Crack... You still not using shadows?
posted by benzo8 on Nov 11, 2005 - 16 comments

Fighting a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. [Via MoFi]
posted by AlexReynolds on Apr 26, 2005 - 35 comments

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

Competition to "reverse engineer" mystery program.
Another cool thingy from the HoneyNet Project; they're inviting people to convert a binary file into its original source. So, who's participating?
posted by arnab on May 3, 2002 - 2 comments

Hacking could now lead to life in prison. Someone that kills someone you love would get less time in prison than what they are proposing for this hacker legislation. Is this punishment just for this crime?
posted by bump on Feb 27, 2002 - 14 comments

Hackers: Computer Outlaws A TLC show(that I'm 3/4 through) that seems to actually use reliable sources to discuss not just cracker behavior, but also the creative side of hackers, pointing out the developments attributed to some hackers. Now Markoff and Mitnick. Not a bad little show....
posted by dglynn on Jan 9, 2002 - 7 comments

This has got to be a payback for one too many Jerry Lewis flicks. French school for hackers. Teaching such things as hacking internal files, setting up trojan horses, viral attack theory, and the like. Of course it's only to put to use by the students for purposes of cyber self defense. Riiiiight.
posted by MAYORBOB on Dec 3, 2001 - 2 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

The crypto used in 802.11 wireless networking has been cracked. The crack is devastating; it's fast and passive. Simply by listening, the 40-bit key can be cracked in 15 minutes. Worse, the crack scales linearly with the number of bits in the key, so raising the key length to 128 bits would raise the crack time to about an hour. 802.11 is used in such products as the Linksys Etherfast Wireless and the Apple Airport. From now on those products should be considered to be completely insecure.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Aug 3, 2001 - 16 comments

Attrition.org's look at the recent China/US web page defacement "war."
posted by skallas on May 2, 2001 - 0 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

Wow, these kids must be really clever to "take down the Internet". Exaggerated headlines are the stuff of news and have been for ages. Lets all try and simultaneously adapt to that. (via geeknik)
posted by davidgentle on Jan 13, 2001 - 9 comments

Microsoft’s network is hacked It's gotta be tough for MSNBC to report this...
posted by chiXy on Oct 27, 2000 - 16 comments

The SDMI Hack challenge seems to have gone down in flames. And apparently it wasn't even very difficult to break into it. This article goes into it in some detail. [more]
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 17, 2000 - 5 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