Comcast Hackers Speak Out

Yesterday we wrote that a recent attack on Comcast’s Web site was a throwback to a more innocent time when computer hackers were mostly vandals out for notoriety, not identity-stealing criminals looking for a quick profit. Not surprisingly, the alleged culprits are a pair of teenagers who are convinced that they’ll soon be arrested and now say the hack wasn’t worth it.

One of the hackers during less stressful times

Wired last night interviewed the two that claim to be the hackers: One is 19-years old, the other 18; both are high school dropouts. (The Business Technology Blog hasn’t verified that these are in fact the hackers, so we’ll have to take their –and Wired’s—word for it.) The pair told Wired they used a combination of technical skills and “social-engineering” – tricking people into disclosing information – to exploit a flaw in systems belonging to Network Solutions, the company that registers the Web site Comcast and many other businesses. This allowed them to redirect visitors to Comcast.net to a site they controlled. One consequence was that people couldn’t access Comcast email accounts through the Web. Yesterday, a Network Solutions spokeswoman told the Business Technology Blog that the problem wasn’t with her company, which she reiterated to Wired.

The hackers told Wired that they contacted Comcast about the security flaw and only decided to hack the Web site after they were treated rudely by the Comcast employee they reached. Comcast neither confirmed nor denied this allegation to Wired; a spokeswoman for the cable company declined to say whether the two were the hackers responsible and referred us to her statement from yesterday that the company was working closely with law enforcement.

The hackers said that the flaw still exists and that others could use it to attack Web sites in addition to Comcast’s. While the hackers said they didn’t steal anyone’s Comcast account information, they said this flaw made it was possible to do so.

To our surprise, we found it hard not to feel a tinge of sympathy for the hackers after reading the Wired article – one said he slept in his clothes because he feared that he would be arrested in the middle of the night. As for the pair’s motive: “Comcast is just a huge corporation, and we wanted to take them out, and we did,” one of the hackers told Wired.

Image: Myspace

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