Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Hacker challenge ends in feuding

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 17:49:42 -0400

Hacker challenge ends in feuding

By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service
JULY 07, 2003

A weekend competition to test the skills of malicious hackers fell apart after
poor planning by contest organizers and infighting among different hacker groups
crippled the Web site responsible for keeping score in the competition.

Contest organizers invited hackers to tamper with up to 6,000 Web sites. Points
were awarded to hackers who could successfully compromise an organization's Web
server and deface its Web pages, according to Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISS)
(see story).

The international contest, known as the Defacers Challenge, was scheduled to begin
Sunday. However, Zone-h, the Web site designated by contest organizers to keep
score of the defacements, was quickly overwhelmed with traffic Sunday morning,
according to a Zone-h statement. The Web site was inaccessible this afternoon.

The Tallinn, Estonia-based security portal, which is the most prominent site that
tracks defacements, had no connection to the Defacers Challenge, and site
organizers were dismayed to learn that Zone-h was designated as scorekeeper for
the challenge, according to Roberto Preatoni, also known as "SyS64738," founder of
Zone-h.org.
"Declaring Zone-h referee was the most stupid thing someone could think of," he
said.
One of Zone-h's 50 operators personally confirms each recorded defacement. Zone-h
could not have verified the flood of 20,000 to 30,000 defacements that were
expected within the six-hour window specified by the contest organizers, Preatoni
said.
Compounding Zone-h's problems, the site on Sunday fell victim to a massive
distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that lasted from 10 a.m till 5 p.m.
local time in Estonia, Zone-h said.

The attack, which downed Zone-h's Web site with 900Mbit/sec. of sustained traffic,
came from a group of Brazilian hackers unhappy about the contest, Preatoni said.
"They told me that defacing is an art and that silly challenges must be
boycotted," he said.

The hackers said that taking down the Zone-h Web site was the only way to thwart
the contest organizers, Preatoni said.

The strategy worked. Defaced Web sites submitted to Zone-h for much of Sunday were
not received by Zone-h operators and could not be verified, Preatoni said.
Despite the feuding and confusion, Zone-h received around 500 recorded
defacements. An additional 400 or 500 were received today, but they had not yet
been verified, Preatoni said.

As predicted by Preatoni and others, the list of compromised sites included few
household names, but plenty of small Web sites in both the U.S. and abroad, such
as www.thebuffrestaurant.com in Boulder, Colo., and www.ddwautomotive.com in
Mishakawa, Ind.

The absence of larger sites was greeted with praise by some security companies.
"I think it's evidence that information sharing and awareness about an issue that
was coming worked," said Pete Allor, manager of X-Force Threat Intelligence
Services at Internet Security Systems Inc., which issued a warning about the
contest on Wednesday.

However, others expressed skepticism about any connection between prior warnings
of the contest and the lack of major defacements, saying that security vendors and
the media hyped a low-level threat.

"We didn't think there was much to it, and it turned out we were right," said Al
Huger, senior director of engineering at Symantec Corp.

The level of weekend defacements reported by Zone-h was consistent with the level
of activity Symantec noted on its DeepSight alert network, Huger said. That level
was in line with the ordinary "background" level of defacement activity and didn't
warrant the alarms, he said.

"In this case, there was no fire where there was smoke," Huger said.
Like the story of the boy who cried wolf, false alarms from security companies
about events such as the Defacers Challenge could cause organizations to doubt
future warnings, creating the possibility of bigger problems when a real crisis
hits, Huger said.

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,82811,00.html

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