By Drew Wilson
The Copyright Alert System rolled out last week and the system has a lot to be desired in terms of protecting the users security (among other things). Many are unhappy about it and, recently, one group hacked an ISP over it.
Time Warner Cable’s support website was defaced last week. The defacement was carried out by a group calling themselves “Nullcrew”. From Web Pro News:
The defaced page landing featured the gorilla (pictured above) from the popular “rustled my jimmies” meme. The hack reportedly lasted anywhere between five to eight hours.
Funny enough, it seems that the IT guys at Time Warner Cable never thought to change their admin password from the default “changeme.” Beyond that, a few names and chat logs from the support site were posted, but no confidential information was shared with the public.
To that end, this particular hack was obviously just meant to draw people’s attention to the Copyright Alert System.
Since the report, NullCrew’s Twitter account (or the one that was referenced) was suspended. We were able to find this account which points to a copy of what the defacement looked like.
While the conclusion suggests that there will likely be other hacks in the future, we haven’t seen any since then up to now. Still, that is not to say that more hacks will eventually happen. Tensions might boil over again depending, in part, how many warnings are handed out.
The one thing that is particularly surprising about the Copyright Alert System is the fact that the ISPs are participating in all of this. We would be far from the only observer to say, prior to the initial announcement of the system, that ISPs would be unlikely to go along with such a system. Yet, here we are today talking about a strike system that the US ISPs actually voluntarily chose to participate in. Considering this is basically failed on arrival policy (and the third of it’s kind to be deeply flawed), it’ll be interesting to see how and if it stands over time.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85
