9/20/2008

You Mess With the Bull, You Get the Horns

From The Register: Conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly's website hacked
Two days after someone broke into the email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, unknown intruders have hacked the website of conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers.

The breach into BillOreilly.com came as retaliation for remarks O'Reilly made on Fox News condemning the attack on Palin's Yahoo email account, according to Wikileaks, a site that makes it easy for whistleblowers, hackers and anyone else to leak documents.

As proof, Wikileaks posted a screenshot of the BillOreilly.com administrative interface that showed the names, email addresses, passwords, and home town of 20 subscribers of the website. In all, information belonging to 205 subscribers was intercepted, according to Eric Marston, CTO of Nox Solutions, the company that maintained the O'Reilly website.

The hack came in response to comments O'Reilly made on Fox News about the posting of contents of Palin's email account, including pictures of her daughter and her contact list.

"I'm not going to mention the website that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites," O'Reilly said, according to this snippet from YouTube. "Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him?"

It's evident from the remark that no one bothered to tell O'Reilly that Wikileaks, the first site to publish the Palin email, is a multi-national, bulletproof organization that has successfully withstood serious take-down efforts before.
I'm not going to say I approve of things like this, but, well, that's what happens when you run your mouth, Billo. You keep talking shit and you'll just make whoever did this angrier. And the angrier they get, it seems, the more people are going to notice what you're doing, and what they're doing.

Is all this beneficial? Probably not. Does it help anything? Certainly not. Is it damn fine schadenfreude? You bet your bippy it is!