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Cryptome Hacked; All Files Deleted
eldavojohn writes "Over the weekend, the whistle blowing site Cryptome was hacked and vandalized, resulting in all 54,000 files being deleted and two days worth of submissions lost. Cryptome reported that its EarthLink e-mail account was compromised in ways unknown, and once the attacker was inside there, they were able to request a new password from the administration console for Cryptome at their hosting provider, Network Solutions. Once the attacker had that password, they deleted the ~7 GB of data that Cryptome hosted in around 54,000 files. Cryptome was able to eventually restore the site, as they keep backups ready for cases like this and stated that they 'do not trust our ISP, email provider and officials to tell the truth or protect us.'"
Holy cow, please edit the submissions before posting them.
*sigh* I'll get modded down for having the nerve to ask for a baseline of professionalism, won't I?
Basically this stuff was never safe to begin with, and you're an idiot if you post anything there expecting to be anonymous.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
The controversy about hacker vs. cracker is old and unsolved. But this case really does not warrant the use of the word "hack/hacked" under any meaning of the word whatsoever. This is a act of pure vandalism, nothing more.
Didn't they tell you to use both uppercase and lowercase letters? Had you used "Passw0rd" instead, nobody would have found out!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Is a social engineering attack a hack? It sounds like someone called over to EarthLink and got an e-mail password reset. Then, once holding the e-mail account, called over to Network Solutions. This sort of thing wouldn't be difficult at all.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
But they weren't smart enough to mirror submissions to other servers and so two days of submissions were lost. Those two days could easily have been the target. If so, then mission accomplished.
A professional organization that knows its web presence is its life is going to have a bit better setup than a server that someone else (Network Solutions in this case) has control over. The right solution is a co-located server that is controlled exclusively by the organization. The hosting company doesn't need to have any passwords. They are also going to have their email processed by their own server and not be relying on an ISP for anything at all except connectivity.
However, a completely amateur operation is going to use shared virtual hosting because it is cheaper and the hosting company will be doing backups for them. And controlling passwords. And all other security. Oh, and using a non-domain based email setup from an ISP.
I guess it is pretty obvious into which category Cryptome falls, right?
Yes, it would cost $2000 a year or more for a co-located server whereas shared virtual hosting is dirt cheap.
Also... only 8G of data? That's it?
how much data do you expect them to host? it's not like they store multi GB long videos of events or anything.
More likely Earthlink, like all ISPs, has a substandard email system. If Scientologists were involved they would have had to pay a $15000 education fee and been forced to run around a pole for 3 days for leaving the backups.
Quite likely, any important submissions will be resubmitted. Not all, of course, but if I had something that I felt HAD to be leaked, I would keep leaking it until it stuck.
Wikileaks doesn't harm western democracies - they do inconvenience the administrations, but the whole concept of leaks are great for the society, citizens, and especially the democracy part; silencing leaks would harm western democracy and destroy the whole meaning of it. I don't care about Chinese government cheating their citizens - that's their problem, I want to be informed about the failures and lies of *my* officials that I elected and that affect my country. I don't want to improve country reputation by simply hiding unflattering things, I want to improve the reputation by fixing the faults. Lying to ourselves about bad stuff not happening is the domain of North Korea, not the western world.
And what do you mean about "journalistic discretion" ? The big newspapers that are following your so-called "journalistic discretion" shouldn't be allowed to call themselves journalists because of this anymore. In earlier times they did proper journalism, dug up the dirt themselves, interviewed informants, cared about their reputation of protecting the anonymity of their sources and fought for the right of publishing facts for the society, even and especially if the goverment claims to be harmed by the facts - for example, the Pentagon papers case. Now wikileaks has picked up the slack where the "journalists" are failing their role in society, and it's a shame - but a shame for the publishing industry.