Crack.LinuxPPC.org Cracked

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 27, 1999 @01:12AM from the that-took-awhile dept.

An anonymous reader noted that it appears that crack.linuxppc.org has been, well, cracked. There is a mirror of the defaced page at here being hosted by attrition.org. The actual box is down as of when I type this. On the upside, it sure took a long time for someone to get in there (I'm still amused that they posted the root password). Jason Haas from LinuxPPC said "The machine is going to Daniel Jacobowitz, who won it legitimately. The subsequent problems occured after Dan installed a backdoor, and have since been cleared up. The original problem was that proftpd-1.2.0pre4 was left running with a /incoming directory."

1 of 125 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Dan's Crack by mhatle · 1999-12-26 21:36 · Score: 5

A lot of us were on IRC when Dan was trying to crack the box. He realized the exploit in ProFTPd, but it still took many days to come up with the shell code.

Shell code on a PPC is much more difficult to do then intel due to the multiple caches.

Dan intentionally didn't deface the page, all he did was add his name to the end of the credits and update the "cracks" to 1. :)

It was a pretty amazing crack exploiting not only the program, but how the CPU controls the cache. Especially when he could barely use GDB on his own machine to debug it. (GDB got confused with the discrepecies in the cache, and the out of order execution of the CPU.)

Congrats Dan! (FYI Dan hacked into the machine well over two weeks ago..)