Dawkins' website forum hacked to send spam
A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday. Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was …
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I just hope...
..that some of the spam recipients were bible-thumbing hell-fire and damnation xtians!
what in the name of god happened there?
Some militant religious type will probably post this as proof that prayer works :)
Although perhaps the forum just evolved the ability to send spam?
Survival of the fittest
That's the thing about web scripts, they kind of mirror evolution. The fittest ones survive, whilst Neanderthal ones like Matt's Scripts die out. Then, along the way flaws appear in the ones that remain and they either get patched or disappear too.
First!
Please God let me be the first to be the one to say that this is divine justice ...
Maybe he can claim on his insurance
If it covers an Act of god.
@Rik Ferguson
You are a complete genius!
I suppose you thought that one up yourself.
Well...
Apparently phpBB isn't at fault... but with a password scheme that is a vaguely modified salted md5 of the password, it wouldn't take that long to brute force especially if you can muster even a modest botnet.
To be fair to Dawkins
if you listen to some of his later interviews, he does accept the possibility, he just thinks it very unlikely.
Well, God works in mysterious ways it would seem.
I like philosophy sometimes...
...but how did them damn pesky electrons get down my copper cable?
Forum spamming the coming thing
The forums of the Scottish Rock Gardening Club have been abused to send spam recently. However, the SRGC doesn't use phpBB, but some other canned forum software.
Having hammered email to the point where the response rate has dropped to zero, the spammers/scammers/phishers may be turning to other avenues to shove their unwanted messages in front of our eyes.
Not hacked
The forum wasn't hacked, it simply evolved to a exploit a niche in the environment.
QED
Evolution of more/phemes not working in Web 2.0 then?
So, how much time does it need for Dawkins site to be sending sperm I wonder.
Enhancement request - bug - or feature?
Ad Fundum
Is that the best your god can come up with to express its dissatisfaction with Dawkins and his rationalist ilk?
Yes
I received some of the said spam. The link to the forums was also hijacked to send users to the spammer's website too!
"Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro...."
....owes me a new keyboard.
@"God moves in mysterious ways" etc
I was going to say that it's nice that He took time out from His busy schedule to answer the prayers of all those people living in poverty and unhappiness (I'm sure they'll all be incredibly happy to know that their wishes to see Dawkin's forum offline have been granted), but then realised I'd probably be feeding the trolls :(
Sorry!
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