Hacking the Governator

mytrip writes, "The Democratic rival to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged that his aides were responsible for obtaining a controversial audio file, in which the Governator was heard disparaging members of other races, in a move that has led to allegations of Web site hacking. A source close to Angelides told CNET News.com that it was possible to 'chop' off the Web links and visit the higher-level 'http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/' directory, which had the controversial audio recording publicly viewable. No password was needed, the source said." And jchernia notes, "As an aside, the California Highway Patrol is running the investigation — maybe the Internet is a truck after all."

Comments

Re:gross generalizations

[ToasterofDOOM]

Nope, it's impossible to be racist against white people, in fact it's impossible to be racist if you're not white actually. Not nice, but an inconvenient truth.

Re:Not "Hacking"

[Grym]

I'm sorry, this is not "Hacking," it's the way the web works. They sent the web server a URL, requesting a document, and the web server gave it to them. They didn't do anything nefarious, underhanded, or tricky. The didn't claim to be anybody they weren't, there was no phishing or pretexting or anything like that involved.

I don't know how you can be so supportive of this activity as it's a dangerous and unclear line to take. Exactly what separates this from an SQL injection attack or spoofing a session ID within a URL? Afterall, you're just sending the webserver a URL/packets, how it responds is their problem, right? I don't think so. It's not like they were just choosing URLs at random. Even if the accused did the most basic form of this attack (i.e. server directory listings), they were still intentionally using URLs designed to trick the server into giving them access to material they knew they weren't authorized to access.

Is it illegal? Probably not, but I'm sure the courts will decide that one. Is it lame? Very. And I think it should call into question the type of campaign they're running. The democratic campaign decided to show their asses, and all for what? Because of a comment that even the victim in question didn't find offensive.

-Grym

Re:gross generalizations

[Sj0]

Correction: A legal fiction created by Politically correct goons.

Probably a bunch of crackers and Jews. Definitely the Jews. It's impossible to be racist against Jews because they're white, you know.