Protest Warriors site hacked?

[Autobot77]

Someone posted this on a comic book message board I frequent.I did a google search but the only things I found were blog postings and a press release from the Protest Warriors own website. Supposedly, a "hacktivist" allegedly hacked protest warrior.com and got a bunch of personal info including cc numbers, which supposedly were used to charge donations to various liberal organizations.
Has anyone heard anything more about this? Personally, I think they are either blowing it out of proportion or are trying to pull a Purlock. If this did indeed happen, well it could not have happened to a better group of people.

[proud patriot]

1. B.S.

[Autobot77]

2. Doh!

I did not realize I was reading something from Jan 05, no wonder I could not find more info on it lol.

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

3. That is the front page story of this week's Chicago Reader

The guy, a 20 yo named Jeremy Hammond, is from the Chicago burbs. Hammond doesn't admit to the hacking but he doesn't deny it. The credit card numbers were never used.

Hammond and his friends have set up a site about the charges against him, FreeJeremy.com. In 2003 he set up HackThisSite.org, "an online training camp that offers aspiring hackers challenges of varying difficulty that are executed on the site, which has been programmed with many of the common security holes found on the Web. In its first two years the site got 2.5 million hits and acquired 110,000 members and a volunteer staff of 34" according to The Reader.

In the article he says he started as a white hat hacker, hacking sites like the computer-science department's web site at UIC to reveal and report vulnerabilities in systems. He was a freshman at UIC at the time; that, and an arrest for spray painting an antiwar slogan on a UIC campus wall, and a weed bust got him disinvited from returning to UIC the following year.

He has also been arrested for clashing with antigay hecklers at a Pride Parade, and in the roundup of protesters at the 2004 RNC. He had already brought himself to the Feds' attention by giving a speech at last year's Defcon calling for people to use "electronic civil disobedience" to disrupt the RNC "by any means necessary."

Prior to the start of the RNC a group of hacktivists broke into Protest Warriors and posted the names and email addresses of its members, along with the passwords and phone numbers of the site's administrators, on Indymedia. (Hammond will not say if he was involved but allows that he is "affiliated" with the group.) Protest Warriors didn't blame Indymedia for the attack but was angry that the information was not taken down.

A PW member known as Elac, and later Clorox, retaliated by taking down Indymedia's NY site. Clorox then set up his own RW hacker site, rightwingextremist.net and joined a group of black hat hackers known as the G00ns whose hacking had previously not been politically motivated.

Protest Warrior co-founder Kir Alfia, who also spoke to The Reader, says that PW was not responsible for taking down Indymedia and that he kicked Clorox out of PW after he found out. This past February Alfia says he found strange activity on his site's chat server, e.g. a poster kept logging into ports he shouldn't have had access to. Soon he started a chat with a user who claimed to be a disaffected member of the group that was hacking PW. This hacker named Hammond among his co-conspirators and said they had gained access to the database of credit card numbers belonging to people who had bought merchandise from PW. He said hackers planned to go an internet cafe and execute a script that would bill all the credit cards for donations to liberal organizations, then claim responsibility by posting on Indymedia and other sites as the "Internet Liberation Front." Alfia checked the info the hacker provided and confirmed its accuracy, then contacted the credit card companies and notified the FBI.

Hammond says he faces 30 years in prison if convicted. However he has not yet been indicted and does not think he will be, as he was told that whoever hacked PW bounced through five or six proxies around the world, and there is probably little electronic evidence against him.

I hope that anyone who thinks these particular hackers are heros would consider his reaction if the situation were turned around and it was DU members' credit cards that had been accessed by rightwing hacktivists. DUers would be screaming bloody fucking murder and campaigning for the hackers' conviction, with or without evidence, if our Visa or MC accounts were compromised. This guy Hammond has his heart in the right place but if he is involved in credit card theft, he's a criminal. And an idiot.

BTW, "Clorox" is believed to have been involved in the April takedown of 16 Indymedia sites, in some cases erasing their archives and displaying rightwing messages on their homepages. Indymedia users retaliated by posting what they deduced was his personal information, and the phone number of the computer-science department at his college. A few days later he was suspended and got his own visit from the FBI. These days he, like Hammond, is laying low.

This information comes from the August 19 edition of The Chicago Reader. As far as I know they do not post articles on their site, so I have no link for the story.

Edited for grammar.