Attrition.org Defacement Mirror Frozen In Time
webword writes: "Attrition.org has decided to stop updating their defacement mirror. Their decision is based on problems associated with the rapid increase in web defacement activity. They don't have the time, energy, or money to keep it updated. Fortunately, the image gallery, music reviews, movie reviews, poetry, and contests, will receive more attention." Those things are certainly more interesting to me than who's scribbling where, and it was becoming no fun for the attrition.org folks to keep up with them.
You could look at this another way; now, all of the bored teenagers on IRC have no way to prove that they cracked momandpop.net, nor is their most revered accomplishment set in the annuls of history, so page-defacings decline.
I mean, it is nothing more than a big "Lookie what I did" ego-trip. I know - I've seen the people that do it.
Cheers,
levine
Th3Y c4nn0tz do th1z! Wh3r3 w1ll my m1rC budd13z g0 t0 s33 @ll 0f my 31337 h4x0rz!
L1nUx 43v4h! FUX0R US G0V3Rm3NTZ!!!
/sarcasm off
good.
I've seen a lot of discussion in the past year on the point of the Attrition mirror, including a session by Attrition themselves at DefCon last year, and this was clearly a long time coming. I'm sorry to see it end, but also in a sense happy for the fact that the guys who had to maintain the mirror will see some peace return to their lives.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
...because they are sick of dealing with the type of people who deface webpages and write to them saying 'Oh, please teach me how to be elite haxor' or 'Dude, ya gotta help me break into my girlfriend's hotmail account' or (personal favorite) 'Help me hack my on-line homework because my teacher (?) is too lazy to grade papers.'
I think after several years of fun and sarcastic replies, they've finally grown tired of the attention and want to stop attracting the riff-raff. Dropping the full mirror seems like it should help. Their site has tons of content and a huge text file archive that has been neglected lately. Probably they want to get back to adding meat to their already excellent site. Besides, with only 3 guys handling the mirroring, the rash of recent (and not-so-inspired) defacements forced them to spend hours mirroring all the crap.
Also, they confirm each hack individually. How could one "automate" this without risking said kiddies trying to break or exploit the automated system. You're not exactly dealing with the most honest or moral segment of the computing community.
Can you imagine receiving 10 or more e-mails a day similar to: 'Hey, where's my defacement? I put it up 10 minutes ago! God, you guys are slow. What are you doing, humping your sister?'
Basically, they were performing a service for which they got nothing back except abuse from kiddies and sys admins. So they just said, "Fuck it." Frankly, I don't blame them at all and look forward to more great stuff popping up on their site.