[Moderator: Article on this can be found on CNN, LATimes, NYTimes, MSNBC,
news.com, Washington Post, ZDnet, AP, and others.]
Forwarded From: William Knowles <erehwon@kizmiaz.dis.org>
Mirror of the hacked page at: http://24.0.214.250/~comega/nyt/index.html
NEW YORK (AP) [9.13.98] -- The Web page of The New York Times was hacked
Sunday morning by a group supporting imprisoned hacker Kevin Mitnick. An
editor discovered the page had been altered at 7:50 a.m., and the page was
taken down to be repaired, said Nancy Nielsen, a Times spokeswoman. ``The
material was so offensive,'' she said. The Times contacted the FBI, she
said.
In a mishmash of creative spelling and vague threats posted on a black
background, a group calling itself HFG, or ``Hacking for Girlies,''
ridiculed several members of the Times staff.
It took special interest in reporter John Markoff, who wrote ``TakeDown,''
a book detailing the search for Mitnick, convicted of computer-related
fraud charges, whose imprisonment since 1995 has been a cause celebre in
the hacker community.
``Do you have nightmares about helping imprison Kevin?'' they wrote.
``Knowing that your lies and deceit helped bring down this injustice?''
Nielson said Markoff had been the target of hackers before, but there had
been no attacks in ``quite a while.''
HFG buried additional comments within the source code, the written
computer instructions which produced the replacement page. Those comments
were less threatening, lacked the creative spellings and included quotes
from Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Voltaire.
HFG also said they hacked the page because they were bored and wanted to
make people laugh.
-o-
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Received on Mon Sep 14 08:49:46 1998