http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/18616.html
Retailer Frustrates Hackers
by Leander Kahney
3:00 a.m. 20.Mar.99.PST
Promoting a new line of backpacks aimed at "hackers," a European bag
manufacturer is running a crack-the-password competition on its Web site.
But to the fury of hackers trying to bypass the competition and crack the
site in earnest, all attempts to date have been unsuccessful.
According to an amusing line of posts to Slashdot, an information
clearinghouse for computer nerds, the hackers reveal their mounting
frustration at being unable to thwart the password competition.
"Come on!" wrote one. "Out of the 10,000 people who have read this
article, no one has found the username and password? I find that very hard
to believe. It has to be something completely insanely easy, right?"
Apparently not.
The "crack and win" password competition is organized by Kipling, a
manufacturer of travel bags, backpacks, and accessories based in Antwerp,
Belgium. The competition promotes its Hacker line of bags and backpacks,
which have names like bookmark, mailbomb, browser, spam, firewall, and
download.
"The game challenges every pirate out there to break into our security and
win a Hacker bag," the company said in a press release.
"You can find the code in two ways," the release continued. "Real computer
freaks will find the information in the traditional hacker manner. Those
with less hacking experience can follow the hints which appear on the
screen, which refer surfers to a Kipling sales point. Those who remain
alert will surely find the letter/number code."
Kipling confirmed it would give a bag to everyone who cracks the code,
which takes the form of a username login and password.
Rising to the challenge, readers of Slashdot quickly encouraged each other
to break the code, just for the hell of it. But after a week of trying,
most efforts have been abandoned.
"I'm sorry to say that so far no one has been able to beat the login,"
said Slashdot contributor Greg Boyce, who offered to buy a Slashdot hat
for the first person to crack it. "Turns out it was a bit more complicated
than I thought it would be."
The most ambitious attempt adopted a "brute force" strategy generating all
possible combinations of username and password. Special software to
automate the process is available on the Web.
Other attempts ranged from examining the source code for the Web page,
which is coded in Javascript, to breaking into the site.
However, Kipling said attempts to breach the site's security have so far
failed.
"No one has cracked it," said Edith Iris, Kipling's marketing manager.
"We've had no problems."
To add to the hackers' irritation, Kipling also garbled the definitions of
cherished computer terms in its marketing blurb.
According to Kipling's site, "A hacker is a cunning computer expert who
cracks the security systems of computers in order to steal or destroy
information."
But in the programming community, a malicious computer expert is called a
"cracker." A hacker is simply a harmless programmer.
"Hacker is the term in common parlance," countered Larry Lein, executive
vice president of Kipling USA. "If you asked me what a cracker was, I'd
say someone who lived in a trailer park down South."
-o-
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Received on Mon Mar 22 09:19:39 1999