[Imc-miami-tech] Community Media Sites Cracked Across the Globe

[radio head]

Community Media Sites Cracked Across the Globe

(Denver, CO April 29th, 2005)

At approximately 8:20 am MST April, 28th, volunteers with the Colorado 
Independent Media Center (CO-IMC) reported that their on-line news server 
had been cracked. Five years worth of community-developed news stories, 
videos, and pictures were destroyed, and the open-source news site was 
replaced with text from an organization calling themselves "g00ns.com". 
Within hours, a dozen other affiliates of the global Independent Media 
Center collective fell victim to the same form of attack. The parties taking 
responsibility claimed that the people behind IMC are "anti-Republican." The 
colorado.indymedia.org website is a local affiliate of a global grassroots 
media movement, with over 200 chapters world-wide. Like the main Indymedia 
website (www.indymedia.org), the locally-based IMC website was largely 
populated with articles chronicling local and international movements 
ranging from criticisms of the Iraq war to various viewpoints on the debate 
surrounding CU-Boulder professor, Ward Churchill. The popular website 
receives over 1,000 visitors a day, but instead of viewing the standard news 
articles, photos, and links that visitors expect to see on the site, those 
who visited the website today were treated to the following statement "You 
have lied to the American People over and over again. You attend The Fifth 
Hope and spread your wicked ideology there. Expect more of this."

Identified only as "Clorox" the author went on to say "Our soldiers are 
dying over se(a)s to give men, women, and children a taste of freedom and 
you call them imperialists. You are nothing but pigs. You are not against 
Bush you are against Republicans, you are against anyone who has a different 
opinion and way of thinking than you. Your box got rooted for lying to the 
American people."

Colorado IMC Volunteer Tony Shawcross responded "The irony of the accusation 
is that the Colorado Indymedia website being attacked is an uncensored, 
open-source news outlet that allows any individual or group to post an 
article or opinion promoting any viewpoint. These people could've posted an 
article to get their point across and we would've posted it 
front-and-center."

As it turns out, the attacker used the very nature of the indymedia websites 
as open source media outlets against them. COIMC volunteer Chris Harris 
explained, "The IMC websites are designed for open access. anyone can submit 
news stories containing images, videos, audio files and other executables to 
the server. This attacker used that open door policy to plant a script or a 
program that would wipe out the content of the sites and give him control so 
that he could post whatever content he wanted."

By Friday, several administrators of the cracked IMC websites were able to 
locate the responsible program and warn other indymedia sites against 
loading the executable on their server. Once identified, the source of the 
program was tracked by several sites to a batch of IP addresses owned by 
Collin Creek Community College in Plano, TX.

Many IMC users immediately recognized this as the same source where last 
year, a Sophomore Computer Science major was accused of hacking the NY IMC 
website and replacing their content with a series of anti-Kerry pop-ups that 
resolved by steering visitors to the official George W. Bush website. The 
student, who maintains the website www.rightwingextremist.net took credit 
for that attack which drove nearly 250,000 hits to his website that month. 
As of Friday April 29th, at least 10 other indymedia sites from across the 
globe have joined the list of victims, including richmond.indymedia.org in 
Virgina, atlanta.indymedia.org in Georgia, austin.indymedia.org in Texas, 
and three overseas sites from cyprus.indymedia.org. Volunteers for these 
organizations have issued a call to friends and allies who support free 
speech to help them re-create their websites and protect them against future 
attacks.

Those interested in supporting the rebuilding efforts in Colorado are 
encouraged to join the Rocky Mountain Indymedia mailing list by contacting 
RM at indymedia.org

from  http://rockymountain.indymedia.org/

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