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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.)
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)
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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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