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Anyone care to enlighten me?

edit: I just reread the article... Let's see, Tom Anderson created MySpace, did war-dialing in the WarGames times, got access to the Chase bank system (apparently with a default or weak password), told 40 of his friends how to do it, and they all got raided simultaneously.

Public figure + black hat hacking in the past = interesting?

There's one thing I found really interesting:

"One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers would try to access them on other systems."



I think most people assumed the MySpace guys knew just enough PHP to get MySpace off the ground and then got lucky. It's interesting to see there's a little more to it than that.


Dialing into a no password-system is hardly any tougher than knowing a bit of PHP.


What's tough about it is that he was 14 and it was the 80's... way before it was popular to take pot shots at PHP.


Actually, it was Coldfusion. But you're right on point.




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