Hackers unlocking Norway's history

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-934060.html

By Robert Lemos 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 7, 2002, 2:00 PM PT

A Norwegian educational center for cultural preservation lost the
password to a historical database cataloging 11,000 original books and
manuscripts, but was able to recover it with help from the Web.

E-mail messages from more than 100 good Samaritans flooded the Ivar
Aasen Center for Language and Culture starting Thursday afternoon
after the organization called for aid in hacking into one of its own
databases to which the password was lost, said a message posted to the
center's Web site on Friday. Among the messages was the correct
password to the locked database, which the center had posted online.

"Our computing expert is now on the case," Kirsti Langstoyl, librarian
for the center, wrote in the posting. "On Monday we (will) know if we
have the original database working, and we will present the name of
the person with the final solution."

It's unknown whether the helpful hackers that provided the correct
answer decrypted the database, guessed the correct password, or used a
flaw in the database's security to obtain access to the data. In its
online message, the center said it would post more details on Monday.

The center had publicly requested aid from security experts on the Web
last week after its employees were unable to open a digital catalog
obtained from the family of Reidar Djupedal after his death in 1989.  
Djupedal was a professor and an expert on Ivar Aasen, an itinerant
Norwegian researcher who, in 1850, established a new language for
Norway that bridged all the country's dialects.

The new Norwegian, or Nynorsk, is spoken regularly by about 20 percent
of the country and is the main language in Western Norway, where
nearly 25 percent of newspapers use it. The widely used Dano-Norwegian
language, or Bokmål, a written language based on Danish, makes up the
other 80 percent, according to the center.

Nine years ago, an archivist registered 11,000 of Djupedal's 14,000
titles in a DBase IV database, but the man died before the collection
and the database reached the center, leaving the password-protected
catalog inaccessible.

"We have no known information from him which can help us solve the
problem," the center lamented on the Web site.

The center called for help from anyone who could break the encryption
on the database or find the password.

The first e-mail received by the center on Thursday not only had the
correct password, but also included the unencrypted files of the
database. Submissions included "ladepujd"--the late professor's last
name spelled backwards--"maiendaiog" and "vmaarett."

It's unknown whether the latter two words are Norwegian.



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