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May 19, 2005
Anti-Phishing Vigilantes
NetCraft is reporting that vigilantes are now tackling phishing sites with the intention of foiling the folks who set them up. The site in question, not mentioned in the article, but visible in the screenshot (probably a very stupid idea, FWIW, especially given that the URL contains everything you need to know to hack the site), was mentioned on spam-l yesterday, by someone looking for advice on how to do exactly what happened. It's not clear, and probably won't be proved, that the poster actually did the defacing, but two things are clear: that the same tricks phishers use to exploit sites can be used against them, and that security is laughably poor on many networks. Even the most junior of systems administrators knows better than to create an account with the same name as the string used as the password.
Posted by schampeo at May 19, 2005 1:51 PM