On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 7:20 PM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 7:07 PM, bawolff
<bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Anthony wrote:
The pages you link to seem to indicate he's nothing more than a
willy-on-wheels type vandal, who at worst tricked an admin into doing
a delete of a page with a very high number of revisions making the
server kittens cry for a moment. There's no indication he has "mad
hacker skillz" in any way or form (and given the tone of that
Encyclopedia Dramatica page, I assume they'd be bragging about it if
he did).
As I said, I couldn't find a page which described it in detail. Maybe
if you look at archive.org?
By the way, my comment about "mad hacker skillz" was meant to be
sarcastic. The term "script kiddie" is probably more accurate.
I don't know how the person did it. I don't know whether they were
*the* Grawp or just a copycat. I don't know if they found a parsing
bug, or they found a backdoor through a default password, or if they
hacked my account password (*). I even don't know if it was
javascript or style sheets or gabagool or whatever the hell. All I
know is that he fucked up my site so bad I didn't know how to fix it
(other than restoring the database, which I didn't feel like doing).
I asked someone to take a look at the site, and he said I was attacked
by Grawp and I needed to upgrade my Mediawiki. At that point I said
"fuck it, I'm just going to host a few pages at Knol, and just take
down the rest".
(*) I believe it was the former, though, because when I looked at the
database the page edits were made by a regular user, not by me, and
not by a special account.
And all of this is irrelevant. Generating an MD5 collision does not
in any way involve "mad hacker skillz".