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Saddam's Inbox Hacked
MotorMachineMercenar writes "Wired News is reporting that Saddam Hussein's email account
(press@uruklink.net)
has been hacked into. The account had a five-letter login with the same password. Messages in his inbox sent from all over the world included everything from death threats to business propositions to offers to sell him WMDs. A choice quote from the article: 'One AOL user sent Saddam a one-word message: 'Imminent.' Attached to the Aug. 6 e-mail was a photograph of an atomic mushroom cloud.' I wonder what the login was."
You'd think it was "press," password "press," but if it were that obvious I think someone would have said so.
I can't help but think this is bogus. What exactly is _Saddam_'s Inbox? Does _he_ read that mail, or do his subordinates? Anyway...interesting, no matter if it's true or not.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Party on
You know, I can't help but thinking that in another time and another place, Saddam and Dubya would have been good buddies, probably frat brothers. They both have an insatiable appetite for the good life, they both make all their money from oil, they both affect a religious piety when it suits them, they both love to be a "man of the people". This isn't as unlikely as it sounds, George Bush junior once owned a company (Arbusto Energy) jointly with one of Osama bin Laden's many brothers.
What the world really needs is for one of Dubya's daughters (not Jenna, the other one) and one of Saddam's sons to fall in love. Then, after many Baz Luhrmann-esque antics their fathers can be reconciled, and live happily ever after on a ranch in the sovereign state of Texraq.
It looks like uruklink.net is still vulnerable:
-port 110 is opened
-it reveals they're running Ipswitch IMail 7.07
-this software has a known overflow and exploit on the web client side
-http://mail.uruklink.net:8383/ is opened.
What are their sysadmin waiting to shut down 110/8383? Wake up!
Side note, it's funny to see that they are running an american OS and mail software..
have you been defaced today?
To play Devil's advocate, from a journalistic point of view, Wired's primary responsibility is to validate the source of the info. Once that is done, you can make a very good case that this is, at least potentially, the sort of thing that People Must Know, which overrides most other considerations.
The contents were probably awfully mundane, perhaps too much so to qualify for The People Must Know, but one could imagine at least in theory that they might have found something interesting in there.
There is precedent for this: For a big example, consider the Watergate scandal. The New York Times wasn't "supposed" to be in possession of that material, and they certainly weren't "supposed" to publish it, but The People Must Know overrode their reservations, and most of us would consider that the right decision based on the info they had at the time.
On the other hand, hacking into my email and telling the world about it would be unethical; there is no need for anybody to know what's in there, so they'd just be rumormongering.
What, you say this "The People Need To Know" is an awfully fuzzy criterion to be using? Damn straight! These ethical things are hard.
(Remember, I'm playing devil's advocate here; I don't believe it's black and white, but I do think there is a strong kernel of truth here.)
Attached to the Aug. 6 e-mail was a photograph of an atomic mushroom cloud.' It is probably not a coincidence that Aug 6 was the 1945 date that the nuke was dropped on Hiroshima.
Tor
Kinda wierd to think the most clear and present danger to the free world uses a yahoo address for there administrators.
Registrar:domaininfo.com
Domain Name: URUKLINK.NET
[Owner of domain name]
osama khalid
27 april street
baghdad, 0000
IQ
[Administrative contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ
Email: ama_72@yahoo.com
Phone: +964 1 5372494
Fax: +964 1 5434731
[Technical contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ
Email: ama_72@yahoo.com
Phone: +964 1 5372494
Fax: +964 1 5434731
[Zone contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ
Email: ama_72@yahoo.com
Phone: +964 1 5372494
Fax: +964 1 5434731
Record created: 29 May 2000
Record last changed: 22 Nov 2001
Record expires: 29 May 2005
Nameserver: nic1.warkaa.com (62.32.60.1)
Nameserver: nic2.warkaa.com (62.32.60.2)
I think you both forget that Osama's entire family has disowned him.
Gotta love guilt by association.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
The changes are propogating across DNS now... "webmail.uruklink.net" is now a private address in the 10.0.0.0/8 class A!
Jouster
A friend of mine was in the Gulf War -- US Army infantry. He said he and all his buds were "encouraged" (i.e., berated by the sargeant until they did it) to sign a waiver and receive an injection of non-FDA-approved anthrax vaccine. I've wondered if this had a possibile relation to Gulf War Syndrome. Any idea?
-l
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As damning as this may sound, it should be remembered that Osama is the black sheep of the family.
Doing bad things with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons before we knew the dire consequences of using them is one thing. But it is another thing to use such weapons on civilians when you know exactly what the effects will be.
So you're saying it's somehow more morally acceptable to experiment on unwitting people who have done nothing to you then it is use tested and proven poisons on people who are in the middle of an uprising? It's not like Saddam was out gassing people for fun, "His own people" were trying to overthrow him.
We used biological, chemical, and radiological substances we thought would hurt people on innocent people to make sure it worked. Saddam used weapons on people trying to overthrow him. One of them is worse then the other, and it isn't Saddam
Lonely?
Find love on the internet
really though, i'm surprised he doesnt give out his public key so people can encrypt the messages they send to him. this would at least create a pain in the ass for the cia.
-- john
> Gulf War Syndrome, which was at first completely
> ignored and lied about, and finally recently
> acknowledged (although we still don't know what it
> is, nor do we know whether the government really
> knows or not - there have been accusations of
> experiments on our own soldiers).
According to William H. Dufy (author of Sugar Blues)
the Gulf War Syndrome was caused by diet coke left
under the sun at 40/50 degrees C. What happens
is this: Diet Coke contains Asparthame. Asparthame
normally is bad for your health (just as plain
white sugar), but under the sun, and with the other
chemical crap diluted in Coke, it turns out to become
methanol, which is the major cause of intoxications.
Not only it was noticed after the Gulf War (and
never brought to the media, since Coke sponsored
the war providing soft drinks for the poor military
personnel),
but also in several occasions by the FAA (Federal
Aviation Authority) on their reports.
I suggest everyone to read that book.
One thing to consider is that a lot of these atrocities don't come out in the open until many years later. 50 years from now, there may be someone else in another forum saying "I really don't think it's fair to compare the X of today with the US of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago"
Plus, a lot of these were less than 50 years ago. The Sarin, Soman, Tabun and VX civilian tests were from 1962-1973 and the Native eugenics was in 1976. That was only 12 years before Saddam used Sarin on the Kurds.
The original poster is certainly wrong when they said GW is worse than Saddam, but GW's only been in power for 2 years, Saddam's been there for 23. I think if you add up all the atrocities the U.S. government has done in the last 23 years (known and unknown, to it's own people and to foreigners) it would outpace what Saddam has done in that time, but then again, the U.S. has a lot more influence over the world.
-no broken link