Source: Inside
Visitors to the Orange County Register's Web site on Sept. 29 were rewarded with an incredible scoop. Bill Gates, the geek who coded Microsoft from the ground up and became a multibillionaire in the process, had been arrested for hacking into ''hundreds, maybe thousands'' of computers, including those of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and Stanford University. The story, one of three that day about the arrest of a hacker known in cyber circles as ''Shadow Knight'' and ''Dark Lord,'' went on to detail Gates's legal plight. Gates, it was reported, was facing two Federal counts of breaking into NASA computers, one count of illegally obtaining credit card numbers and one count of making more than $1,000 in purchases through credit card fraud. The article concluded with the bizarre plea, ''FREE THE SHADOW KNIGHT SAVE MY ANAL VIRGINITY OR ILL HAVE TO IZZOWN YOU ALL.'' Before this results in a flurry of rumor-mongering e-mail forwards, let us point out that none of the revelations above are true. The Register's Web site, it turns out, had been attacked by a cybervandal, and three of its news stories ''edited.'' While other news organizations such as ABC.com, the Associated Press, George magazine, the Drudge Report and the New York Times have suffered Web defacements, the Register breach is the first known instance of a ''subversion of information attack'' at a media Web site. In most attacks, hackers replace the front page of a site with one of their own design, which usually trumpets their brazenness and technical skills. But since a subversion of information attack doesn't necessarily call attention to itself, the result is much more sinister, says Brian Martin, a staff member for attrition.org, a site that tracks computer crime and archives mirrors of hacked pages. ''What if intruders were to make subtle changes to various stories without them being noticed?'' Martin asks. ''Unfortunately, no one has the ability to say it hasn't happened yet because the nature of this threat prevents us from knowing.'' |
I always knew Bill Gates was a criminal
