Web entrepreneur commits perfect cybercrime

 

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By Matt Whipp

Posted on 29 Mar 2007 at 17:56

A Seattle-based web entrepreneur has achieved the perfect political cybercrime, without breaking any laws.

Newsvine.com chief executive and co-founder Mike Davidson's perfect hack was the result of what you might call a social engineering tactic in that it involved the use of one of his free templates.

Senator John McCain is standing in the 2008 US elections and has followed the crowd into the world of Web 2.0 with a MySpace page.

McCain's coders took a shortcut in getting a profile for the 70-year-old online and used one of the free templates available from Newsvine.

The problem was that the resulting profile didn't credit the design to Davidson and, rather than using images they hosted themselves, they chose to use those hosted on Davidson's server, using up his bandwidth.

'Numerous people have written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain has been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care,' he writes. 'I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.'

Davidson replaced the image referred to in McCain's profile. However, the new image was a lot less prosaic: it described a political about-face by McCain on the subject of gay marriage and a penchant for partnerships between passionate females.

'The only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.'

The image appeared on McCain's page for a matter of hours before it was spotted by McCain's team and replaced with something more appropriate.