MacRumorsLive Get’s Hacked
Every year during the Apple keynote at the MacWorld Expo, the MacRumors team provides an update feed to let everyone know what Apple is announcing. This year, towards the beginning of the keynote, strange messages started showing up in the feed. The first one saying, “STEVE JOBS JUST DIED.” It seemed like that might be just a joke, since Steve wasn’t even at the keynote anyway, but a few lines later read, “Retraction: Steve jobs did not just die. Don’t know how that got in there.” Soon after a few other strange messages showed up, including a link to one of the hacker’s websites. Shortly after that the entire MacRumorsLive website went down.
My coworker Nate was in IRC, and someone noted that you could reach all the Mac Rumors admin files at this address: http://www.macrumorslive.com/admin/
Sure enough, there all the files were, including a .passwd file listing all of the admin user passwords. So it’s obvious how the hackers got in now. This is pretty embarrassing, and I feel bad for the MacRumors team. They typically do a good job with macworld updates, and they’ll probably loose some of their audience for good from this. I imagine if there’s a lesson to be learned here, they’ve learned it.