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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (54463)	9/3/1999 11:45:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Well, the dopey Russians tried to knock a Chechen website off the Internet, because it was posting news bulletins favorable to the guerrillas in Dagestan, which is right next door to Chechnya. (The mini-war in Dagestan is still going on.) The site is registered in the US. What the Russians (Military Intelligence, I think) did, we figured out, was to send an E-Mail to Network Solutions, using the e-mail address of the young man who had registered the Chechen site (and his own), asking interNIC to change the password and redirect traffic to another server(also in the Us). NSI did so, and then informed the young man, whom I will call AD, that they were proceeding with the changes he had requested. Naturally, AD was horrifed, and immediately tried to inform NSI that he had requested no such thing. Well, it took him FIFTEEN phone calls to get the matter straightened out. (What an unwieldy bureaucracy! They deserve to lose their monopoly.) In the meantime, at the "new" server, the Russkies simply substituted their own fake web page for the "real" web pages of both sites. The fake web page featured a picture of the famous Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov (who had fought in the 19th century Caucasian war), dressed in the uniform of a contemporary Russian solider, with an automatic in his hands, and next to his head, the legend: "Misha was here." Then, to the right, the message: "This will be the fate of all websites of murderers and terrorists!" And then, down below, some more nonsense, naughty words, and threats. Pretty crude. At first, they were so pleased with themselves! Russian TV broadcasters crowed, congratulating "our brave hackers" (!!) with "destroying" the oppositionist website...Jeez. Those guys weren't even hackers! They never even broke into the sites in the first place, just swapped one web page for another. I understand that now that the "real" sites are back up again, the inglorious would-be hackers have tried the same ploy again, sending another e-mail to NSI, again in AD's name, again asking for a new password, and again asking that site traffic be redirected. This time, however, NSI contacted AD first, to find out whether he really wanted them to proceed. All this sounds pretty primitive to me, but I am no computer expert, let alone an expert on hacking. Does anyone on the thread know what else they might/could try? Nothing makes me happier than foiling censors, or at least exposing their tricks. (I have an article coming out on the subject soon.) Joan