Gizmodo: hax

How Two Teenage High School Dropouts Hacked Comcast

matt buchanan — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:30:00 EDT

A couple days ago, a pair of teenagers brought down Comcast's homepage and mail service. They haven't been arrested (yet), so they gave the full story to Wired. Like most nuclear-level hacks, they didn't intend to hijack the website and mail hosting of the biggest cable company in the country. They say they even tried to warn Comcast. But, "once we were in," said EBK, the younger of the two, "it was, like, fuck it." Here's how it went down, in a nutshell.

On Tuesday, Defiant and EBK (19 and 18 years old, respectively) say they exploited a flaw to hack into Network Solutions, a domain registrar, to take control of Comcast's domain management console and 200 of its domain names. (Network Solutions denies the flaw.) To start, they relocated Comcast.net's technical contact to the Dildo Room at 69 Dick Tard Lane, and then got a hold of the actual dude to let him know what they'd done. He hung up on them, which is when the shit hit the fan.

EBK then decided to reroute all of Comcast.net's traffic to their own servers, so users got the delightful message, "KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast. sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven." They spent the rest of the night frantically opening webhosting accounts—50 in all—to handle all the traffic. After around 6 hours under their control, Comcast got the domain back, but some users still didn't have email for hours after that.

They're still waiting for the (probably inevitable) legal repercussions. Check out the whole thing over at Wired, it's a good read. [Wired]

Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Keyboards Cracked for Coworker Espionage

Matt Buchanan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:00:11 EST

The crackers at Dreamlab have busted open the wireless encryption on Microsoft's Optical Desktops 1000 and 2000, as well as any others using the same simplistic scheme: There's only about 256 possible encryption keys, making it like pie to crack after sniffing a few tens of keystrokes. So easy, in their demo they nail three keyboards at once.

If you don't wanna deal with the hack-speak, the bottom line is that a remotely enterprising and nosy co-worker could whip up a wireless keylogger to spy on the whole office. Then again, what office springs for wireless keyboards for everybody? [Remote-Exploit.org via Hackaday]

Playstation 3 Turned Into "Crackstation" for Super Hacking Goodness

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:20:36 EST

Forget Folding@home and its feel-good applications. There are cooler things to be done, like cryptography cracking. Taking advantage of the Cell's vector architecture, a security consultant with Security-assessment.com has cooked up a way to to bust passwords open like bad Easter eggs really, really fast. His Crackstation shoves past "the current upper limit of 10-15 million cycles per second—in Intel-based architecture—up to 1.4 billion cycles per second." To put that in non-geek, "Intel processors are designed to do all kinds of complex calculations, whereas the PS3 is good at doing simple things very quickly." The work apparently stands to change the whole cryptography industry.

For one, it shows that using Intel processors or ones with similar architecture as benchmarks "just is not good enough anymore." Cracking cryptographer will probably get faster all around as well, which should ultimately drive stronger cryptography with better implementation. Though they haven't tried it yet, by using a technique similar to Folding@home with distributed loads, the cracking power could obviously be increased exponentially.

All of that said, I just think it's funny how it's emphasized over and over again how "simple" Cell's architecture is, after Sony's spent all this time telling us how complex and awesome it is. [PC World]