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Project Euler has been hacked

projecteuler.net

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Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#11

Post by cautious_int »

madez wrote: post #10
flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

Think about agencies, not private actors — then this site makes a perfect target. Recruit and subvert are basic tasks for these agenices, and to do so you need information about the candidates. This website had probably a significantly higher proportion of interesting prospects.

But what information was even held on the website. Wasn't it just a public listing of usernames with the score.

According to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181773 then don't even store emails anymore.

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#12

Post by 88e282102ae2e5b »

flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

There are plenty of other motivations. It could be:

1) a novice hacker looking for experience 2) an automated bot that scanned IPs for some vulnerability and acted on its own when it found one 3) someone looking to extort the owner for money 4) someone with a personal vendetta against the owner 5) someone looking to secretly plant bitcoin mining software on the servers (who got caught) 6) someone looking to alter their own score to help them get some sort of math job

I could probably go on for a while, but you get the point. It's hard to ascribe intent to this sort of thing without more information.

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#13

Post by TeMPOraL »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #12
flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

There are plenty of other motivations. It could be: 1) a novice hacker looking for experience 2) an automated bot that scanned IPs for some vulnerability and acted on its own when it found one 3) someone looking to extort the owner for money 4) someone with a personal vendetta against the owner 5) someone looking to secretly plant bitcoin mining software on the servers (who got caught) 6) someone looking to alter the…

Or 7) someone who did it for teh lulz. While rare, this also happens. But I agree; it's hard to guess motivations behind the attack without more info.

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#14

Post by qopp »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #12
flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

There are plenty of other motivations. It could be: 1) a novice hacker looking for experience 2) an automated bot that scanned IPs for some vulnerability and acted on its own when it found one 3) someone looking to extort the owner for money 4) someone with a personal vendetta against the owner 5) someone looking to secretly plant bitcoin mining software on the servers (who got caught) 6) someone looking to alter the…

5) The Bitcoin mining thing is a bit of a historic artifact, today you could barely achieve a cent per month on even the very fastest of cpus

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#15

Post by keenerd »

One of my side-projects was to convert all of Project Euler into a straightforward offline flat text file:

http://kmkeen.com/local-euler/

At the time of the last hacking incident, this was pretty much the only mirror of PE. Since then the textfile has been updated and includes some (hashed) answers.

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#17

Post by brownbat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #13
88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other motivations. It could be: 1) a novice hacker looking for experience 2) an automated bot that scanned IPs for some vulnerability and acted on its own when it found one 3) someone looking to extort the owner for money 4) someone with a personal vendetta against the owner 5) someone looking to secretly plant bitcoin mining software on the servers (who got caught) 6) someone looking to alter the…

Or 7) someone who did it for teh lulz. While rare, this also happens. But I agree; it's hard to guess motivations behind the attack without more info.

8) Waterholing targeting a user or group that frequents the site?

I like #2 though, or as I'd put it: flotsam of the internet, like how slammer ended up at davis besse.

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#18

Post by S4M »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #12
flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

There are plenty of other motivations. It could be: 1) a novice hacker looking for experience 2) an automated bot that scanned IPs for some vulnerability and acted on its own when it found one 3) someone looking to extort the owner for money 4) someone with a personal vendetta against the owner 5) someone looking to secretly plant bitcoin mining software on the servers (who got caught) 6) someone looking to alter the…

As Project Euler is completely free and has a positive impact on the programming community, it would be very sad if the reasons for the hacking were 3) or 4).

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#19

Post by Retrograderz »

Get off the internet noobz, or people will do it for you.

Teaches them right! They think they know how to host websites, but they are wrong.

Your computer is not yours if you don't know how it works. Same thing with web servers. No control=No ownership.

I hope this teaches them a lesson. If you want to host content on the Net, pay someone to do it. You don't have any clue what you are doing.

Period!

Re: Project Euler has been hacked

#20

Post by 0x0 »

flux_w42 wrote: post #4

It's sad that someone would hack a site like this. The only thing they could possibly want are the email and password combinations. I hope they are stored in a secure way.

It was posted elsewhere that visiting the hacked site triggered downloads of "flash_updater.exe" type trojans, so maybe one reason for the hack was to spread malware.
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