Sections of ATTRITION that have received the 'FIN' tag. This means they will no longer be updated, but the project description will remain here for reference.
One of the most predominant sections of Attrition was the defacement mirror. What began as a small collection of web site defacement mirrors soon turned into a near 24/7 chore of keeping it up to date. In 2000 and 2001, we experienced single days of mirroring over 100 defaced web sites, over three times the total for 1995 and 1996 combined. With the rapid increase in web defacement activity, there were times when it required one of us to take mirrors for four or five hours straight to catch up. Added to that the scripts and utilities needed to keep the mirror updated, statistics generated, mail lists maintained, the time required for basic functionality was immense. A "hobby" is supposed to be enjoyable. Maintaining the mirror finally became a thankless chore. It was completely closed off for a decade but re-opened in 2021.
While running the mirror (see above), we frequently wrote commentary about specific defacements, trends and related topics. Since the mirror stopped, so did our written commentary.
During the early years we all saw humorous images passed around the net. Attrition began collecting these images and putting them in one location. It was a well organized collection without popups, banners, mandatory registration, or image branding. Due to heavy inline linking of our images, it was causing a huge strain on our bandwidth and served little purpose and brought little value to the site. The only joy it brought us was an amusing legal threat from Mastercard. If we had focused on that and nothing else, we likely would have made millions off advertisements like many other sites did after us. Damn.
As part of the Errata Project, we began tracking incidents of data loss. This included large scale incidents of personal information being compromised or misplaced. In time, this was moved to the Open Security Foundation and turned into its own project. It was later folded into a service of a commercial company.
For many years, Attrition hosted the infamous "Hacker Sexchart" as a favor, that was created and maintained by Lish. She originally created it as a point of humor and it showcased her own connections to various people in the scene. After a system upgrade in 2018 or so, the vhost for that domain was not re-added and sexchart.org wasn't available. The content was via a direct URL on attrition but that was not linked to off our main page. Given the original purpose of the chart, lack of updates for almost a decade, and it not being available while no one noticed (including us), the decision was made by Lish to just keep it offline. Anyone claiming they were responsible for taking it down probably wants to sell you a bridge too.
Various people or groups who have slandered Attrition or staff members. Eventually some of this broke out into their own sections, specifically 'Negation' and 'Shame'.
Fucked Up College Kids was an e-zine started in 1993 by Jericho. It lived for over five years and provided a forum for many young writers to express their views and vent their frustrations. While the zine stopped, a lot of the files and commentary have withstood the test of time.
Fucked Up College Kids had a side project focused on user submitted poetry. It didn't last long, but was a fun creative outlet.
Random contests that we came up with. Since then, there have been smaller one-off contests typically run same-day or short periods, via Twitter.
The Denial of Service database began as a small private collection of DoS attack info. It was first made public for the security firm RSI and later moved to Attrition. Because of the enormous volume of DoS attacks being discovered, and the limited use of such a database, it was never updated. It has been left intact to show the wide variety of problems that can exist in software packages and operating systems.
The text archive was created and maintained for over a year to combat the problem of text files vanishing off the net. As more and more sites would go down, less people seemed to preserve these files for various reasons (historic, information, posterity). This archive will remain here but will no longer be updated with new files. We strongly recommend you visit textfiles.com instead.
The security advisory archive was originally maintained to preserve advisories posted to mail lists when security company websites barely lasted a year and no sites archived the mail list posts. Rather than have the information disappear forever, we archived it. These days there are dozens of sites that archive such postings. Combined with the fact that formal advisories make up a small percent of vulnerability disclosures, and this archive is obsolete.
One of the original sections of Attrition maintained by Cancer Omega, a gun owner and advocate for safe gun handling and responsible ownership. At the time there were basically no tutorials on guns like this and they continue to be heavily referenced 20 years later.