【英语科技】回忆15年前《纽约时报》网站被黑事件

There’s going to be an awful lot to say about the massive hacking effort by attackers thought to reside in China that rocked the New York Times last year. And much of what can be said is already there in the longish takeout on the incident on today’s front page.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll spare you the effort. Last fall, the Times was getting ready to publish a lengthy report about how relatives of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao had amassed a sizable fortune. Knowing China’s reputation for carrying out hacking attacks against companies and other entities that annoy it, Times executives had the foresight to have the company’s Internet service provider watch for any unusual activity.

Predictably, it showed up. It was a classic spear-phishing attack that contained a remote access tool, packaged in an email attachment innocently opened by an employee. The incident provided the Times and the security firm it hired, Mandiant, the opportunity to watch the intruders’ activity for an extended period of time as they roamed the network. Once Mandiant had a pretty good idea of all the different paths for getting in and out, they shut down and isolated all the affected machines, plugged all the holes and that was that.

Interesting. But it’s not the first time the Times has been hacked in a high-profile manner. The story reports that the first attack occurred on Sept. 13. That’s a notable date because it is, coincidentally, the 15-year anniversary of the day in 1998 that the New York Times Web site was attacked by a hacking group calling itself Hacking for Girliez.

I wrote about that attack for Wired. The attack was a basic Web defacement. The Times front page was replaced with another page (you can see the results, not completely safe for work, here) that contained within its HTML code a rambling message about the then-jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick, and a weird poem.

No one was ever arrested for the attack and it’s a pretty sure bet no one ever will be, mainly because the statute of limitations would have long expired. But someone did get the perpetrators to sit for an interview. Adam Penenberg, then a writer for Forbes and now an editor for PandoDaily, got “Slut Puppy” and “Master Pimp” to answer some questions. Their motivation at the time? They were bored and couldn’t agree on a video to watch.

The 1998 attack was the first incident for the Times, and for a little while its entire Web site was taken down in order to prevent the display of the hacked page. The timing of this attack probably has nothing to do with this latest attack. But then again, hackers of all stripes are known for long memories and a unique sense of humor.

关于去年《纽约时报》(New York Times)遭到据信来自中国的黑客大规模攻击一事，将会有铺天盖地的报道。能说的大部分已经囊括在《纽约时报》周四头版的长篇报道中。

相关阅读没人因那次的攻击而被捕，而且可以相当肯定地说也不会有人因此被捕，主要是因为早已过了追诉时效。但确实有人采访到了入侵者。当时《福布斯》(Forbes)的撰稿人潘纳伯格(Adam Penenberg)联系到Slut Puppy和Master Pimp，让他们回答了一些问题。当时他们是出于什么动机？是因为他们感到无聊，无法就看什么录像达成一致意见。潘纳伯格现任PandoDaily的编辑。

1998年的攻击是《纽约时报》首次遭到黑客攻击，有一段时间《纽约时报》的整个网站都被关闭了，以便防止页面被黑客页面替换。此次攻击事件的时间或许与1998年的攻击无关。但话又说回来了，各种黑客都是出了名地有着好记性和独特的幽默感。