On July 20, 2001, a (presumably) Russian defacer known as 'RyDen' compromised the machine hosting "ethics.org", the "Ethics Resource Center".

Given the unethical nature of defacing web pages, the act alone had a bit of irony to it. More interesting this time was the content of the defacement. Instead of the usual crap seen from most defacers, RyDen chose to replace their page with a "Free Dmitry" message, in reference to the recently jailed software programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who was detained shortly before returning home after attending Defcon (www.defcon.org). More ironic is the ethical considerations of the set of events surrounding Sklyarov, Adobe and the FBI.

Russian Adobe Hacker Busted
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45298,00.html

FBI becomes Copyright '911'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/20548.html

This defacement was part of a 'mass hack' in which RyDen defaced 18 domains. A copy of the defacement can be seen courtesy of the SafeMode mirror:

http://www.safemode.org/mirror/2001/07/20/www.patientcard.net/




---
© 1999, 2000, 2001 Copyright Brian Martin
Permission is granted to quote, reprint or redistribute provided the text is not altered, and the author and attrition.org is credited. The opinions expressed in this text are not necessarily the opinion of all Attrition staff members.

To subscribe to this list, send mail to majordomo@attrition.org with subscribe defaced-commentary in the BODY of the mail.