WP fails to protect 0x80^H^H^H^HDeep Throat

["Gary Funck" <gary () intrepid com>]

Washington Post fails to protect Deep Throat

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29805

By Nick Farrell
21 February 2006

THE WASHINGTON POST, famous for hiding the name of its Deep Throat source
during the Watergate scandal, might have accidentally revealed the name of
one of its sources in a less important yarn about a hacker.

Hack Brian Krebs penned a fairly gushing piece about a 21-year-old hacker
identified as "0x80" who claimed to have broken into 2,000 PCs around the
globe. 0x80 apparently uses the hacked PCs to send out spam.

In amongst detailed descriptions of how 0x80 smokes, which in the US
journalistic style is called 'colour', Krebs revealed that his subject lived
in a small town in Middle America. "The nearest businesses are a used-car
lot, a gas station/convenience store and a strip club," the article said.

All hard to trace, but for the fact that the article ran a doctored picture
of 0x80 which when the people at Slashdot had [1] a look at the metadata in
the pic it revealed 0x80 lived in the town of Roland, population 2,842.

Since only a third of the population are 0x80's age, less than half of them
are male, and not that many live close to the strip club, he shouldn't be
too easy to find, particularly with Kreb's colourful description.

When this was pointed out to Krebs in his bog [2], he said that he was aware
of it.

The picture is no longer linked from the article, but it should not be long
before 0x80 will be located. Just as well digital cameras were not around
during Watergate.

[1] http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177830&cid=14748871
[2]
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/more_proof_of_rogue_insta
lls_o.html

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