Intellectual Property Law

Wired Talks to Comcast Hackers

By Cynthia Brumfield

Wow. Wired's Kevin Poulson claims to have conducted an hour-long interview with two hackers, "Defiant" and "EBK," who are claiming responsibility for taking down Comcast's main website and email for over five hours on Thursday. The two claim to be juvenile deliquent, high-school drop-out teens (18 and 19 year-olds) who belong to an underground group called Kryogeniks.

Defiant and EBK say they exploited a flaw at the domain management console at Network Solutions to gain control over 200 Comcast domains, although Network Solutions disputes this claim. They are simultaneously euphoric over the publicity that their hacks created and frightened that they will soon be identified by authorities and arrested.

They also claim to have called Comcast's main technical contact to let him know that they had taken over administrative control of the domains and after the Comcast employee scoffed at them, they ramped up their effort by redirecting traffic to servers under their control. Both claim they hacked into the cable operator's site because of Comcast's "shitty" service and deny that Comcast's well-publicized P2P interference was a motivation behind the attack.

Obviously Wired's Poulson believes that both Defiant and EBK are responsible for the attacks and was directed to the two by another member of Kryogeniks. It's only a matter of days, if not hours, before we find out if Defiant and EBK are going to jail for a very long time.

If Poulson can find these two guys, you'd better believe that Comcast, and the FBI, can too. One commenter to Poulson's post even published the name, address, cell phone number and IP address for Defiant's father -- and it looks legit.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).