Re: [ISN] Hacking Black Hat

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Fri Sep 08 2006 - 01:09:44 PDT


Forwarded from: Jason Scott <jason (at) textfiles.com>

While everyone's pigpiling on Winkler and his not-so-fantastic article:

> Then came the incident that should have permanently shut the door on 
> the "honest hacker" shtick: the 1999 uproar when Cult of the Dead Cow, 
> a particularly high-profile group of hackers, passed out CDs of the 
> newly released version of the Back Orifice hacking tool at DefCon. 
> Those CDs were "somehow" infected with the Chernobyl virus. Cult of 
> the Dead Cow spokespeople claimed it was an accident, but do you 
> really believe that some of the most security-savvy hackers around 
> happened to not notice an infection from such a widespread, 
> high-profile virus?

I was there. I'm a historian. I watch and observe. (See also: 
www.textfiles.com ). I'm friends with a lot of members of the cDc, and 
at least a good acquaintance with the rest, going back 15 years in some 
cases.

The cDc didn't expect the level of hype around BO2K. Who really could? 
The chatter, the press, the insane drum-beat that surrounded them. They 
found that there was a call for many more CDs than the intended handful 
they'd wanted to give out. (The plan, basically, was to watch it spread 
out from a lucky few to the world).

They needed a bunch more, and fast. They needed a convenient machine 
with a CD burner. They found one. It was infected. They didn't know 
this. They made the dupes and handed them out, and then it started 
coming back that they were infected.

I saw the faces of a few of the cDc members when they found out, when it 
came back the new batch was infected. These were not the faces of 
giggling tykes flushing M-80s down a john. Dildog slaved at that program 
for months to get it to work as well as it did, and ensure it could 
handle the onslaught of being released open source. Count Zero, Veggie 
and the rest wanted to put on a great show, mess up some minds, do a 
spectacular vegas hoedown and come out with the real goods, the real 
deal at the end. The look on their faces was the look of chefs entering 
a cooking contest and finding out someone got food poisoning. The word 
you're looking for is "crushed".

Enjoy the view from wherever you are, but buy a better damned telescope. 
Or speak to someone who was there.


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