Newsbytes hack tries to embarrass The Register

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21094.html

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 17/08/2001 at 11:20 GMT

The Washington Post's tech-news repeater Newsbytes has implied that we
were talking bollocks when we revealed several credit card hacks in a
recent story entitled Hacking IIS -- how sweet it is"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20960.html

In that piece we claimed -- on the basis of something called evidence
-- that StrawberryNet.com http://secure.strawberrynet.com; mWave.com
http://direct.mwave.com; and Stic.net http://www.stic.net had been
hacked by means of the IIS folder traversal vulnerability
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/
bulletin/MS00-078.asp.

In hopes of catching us with our trousers down, Newsbytes copy drone
Brian McWilliams hastily ran up a little would-be expos?
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169018.html challenging our accuracy
on the strength of his conversations with the victim companies, all of
whom predictably denied being hacked.

Of course we've seen the victims of CC hacks deny it endlessly in the
face of withering evidence, as Egghead did
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/18547.html, and as Amazon
did http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/17387.html. We
consider it an occupational hazard.

In this case Newsbytes dutifully rang the managers of the victimized
companies and allowed them to claim that they have no knowledge of a
hack. This, of course, is less than conducive to solid newsgathering;
there's often a sort of 'selective ignorance' at play in such
circumstances, we've found.

And get this: Newsbytes performed a "scan" of some sort which
indicated, to McWilliams' satisfaction, that none of the sites in
question was vulnerable.

"A scan performed by Newsbytes today revealed that none of the three
firms are (sic) currently vulnerable to the exploit which enabled
variants of the Code Red Worm to infect thousands of Web sites,"
McWilliams writes.

Perhaps McWilliams doesn't understand that Code Red exploits the .ida
buffer overflow vulnerability, not the IIS folder traversal
vulnerability, which we claimed had been used against the sites in
question. A minor detail, perhaps, depending on the power of that
"scan" he claims to have performed.

We, on the other hand, ran the standard folder traversal exploit on
all the sites, and found, at press time, that two had since patched
against it, while one remained wide open, though it did manage to get
itself patched within four hours of our story's appearance.

We didn't mention it at the time because we knew the system was open
and didn't want that tiny minority of our beloved readers whom we
don't fully trust to screw them. But since it's now fixed, we'll tell
you that it was mWave, and that we had a nice look at the contents of
their C drive, and managed to call cmd.exe to boot.

As for Strawberrynet, we reckon they'd prefer that we don't ring their
customers, whose names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers
and expiration dates we've seen, to confirm that they've made
purchases there. But if Brian McWilliams insists, we'll just have to,
we suppose, in spite of the alarm it might cause them. Of course that
would be a terrible embarrassment for the company, so prudence demands
that we only go as far as McWilliams pushes us.

And as for Stic.net, we've seen their customer accounts, and we know
how much their staff earn. We'd hate like hell to have to publish that
data, so we hope for their sake that Brian McWilliams won't force our
hand. Of course we'll do whatever we must to demonstrate our veracity.

"For them (The Reg?) to blaspheme us and put our customers at risk
like that, well, this old boy and I can go out behind the barn real
easy," said David Robertson, president of Stic.net," to Newsbytes'
McWilliams.

Yeah, we spoke with Robertson too, and he was falling all over himself
denying the hack, ringing us every hour on the hour for a time. We've
since learned that he's owned the hack, and even apologized to
CardCops, the organization which first brought his troubles to our
attention.

He's become immensely harder for us to contact since then. For a guy
who seemed to have our phone number memorized, he's gone suspiciously
quiet of late. He's since neglected to answer our e-mail and our phone
calls.

But he'll talk to twinkie journos who have absolutely no evidence with
which to refute him -- or us, for that matter.



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