Kevin Mitnick creampied by Pakistani rage

21/08/2006 Written by Roberto Preatoni

Kevin Mit­nick, the infa­mous cracker spe­cial­ized in social engi­neer­ing tech­niques whose life made the Hol­ly­wood screens is known as a per­son who is build­ing his pro­fes­sional rep­u­ta­tion (not with­out obsta­cles though) by offer­ing a vari­ety of ser­vices in the IT Secu­rity field and hold­ing well-​paid con­fer­ences and appear­ances all over the world.

A group of Pak­istani crack­ers van­dal­ized today the web­sites of 4 dif­fer­ent Kevin Mitnick’s ven­tures, in what it looks like to be a focused per­sonal attack. The sites defen​sive​think​ing​.com, mit​sec​.com, kev​in​mit​nick​.com and mit​nick​se​cu​rity​.com have been defaced with offen­sive mes­sages against his person.

But Kevin Mit­nick is not new to this kind of atten­tions from the defacer’s world…

Appar­ently the attack­ers per­formed a Mitnick-​targeted mass deface­ment, no details yet about the intru­sion method­ol­ogy and moti­va­tion even if the lat­ter one can be eas­ily under­stood just by read­ing the offen­sive mes­sages posted on the deface­ments (directed against the gen­eral white-​hat cat­e­gory)

2006/​08/​21	FBH	H	defen​sive​think​ing​.com	Linux
2006/​08/​21	FBH	H M	mit​sec​.com	Linux
2006/​08/​21	FBH	H M	kev​in​mit​nick​.com	Linux
2006/​08/​21	FBH	H M	mit​nick​se​cu​rity​.com	Linux

Kevin Mit­nick though is not new to such kind of treate­ments. Right after he was released from the com­puter ban imposed by US author­i­ties, he opened the defen​sive​think​ing​.com com­pany which web­site was defaced repeat­edly by dif­fer­ent crack­ers, that time more as a “wel­come back Kevin” message.

Zone-​H has a back­log of such episodes as well:

Date	Attacker	Flags	Domain	OS	View
2003/​02/​24	DkD[||	H R	defen​sive​think​ing​.com	Win 2000
2003/​01/​30	Bug­Bear		defen​sive​think​ing​.com/​h​a​c​k​e​d​.html	Win 2000

At that time, Mitnick’s web­site was repeat­edly defaced, despite Mit­nick moved the web­site from host­ing com­pany to host­ing com­pany, due to mis­con­fig­ured Front­Page exten­sions. At that time Zone-​H wit­nessed a kind of strug­gle between dif­fer­ent defac­ers who were try­ing to put their nick­names on Mitnick’s home­page and Mitnick’s fans who were con­tin­u­ing to replace the defaced page with a copy of the orig­i­nal one, always tak­ing advan­tage of the same Front­Page mis­con­fig­u­ra­tion. The whole thing went on a full day…

Com­ing back to today’s attacks it’s not clear if the crack­ers went through a Mitnick’s site hole or if they abused of some other sites (with­out report­ing them) as it appears that the same IP is host­ing also other web­sites, one of which was defaced a month ago.