Saddam's Inbox Hacked

MotorMachineMercenar writes "Wired News is reporting that Saddam Hussein's email account ([e-mail]) has been hacked into. The account had a five-letter login with the same password. Messages in his inbox sent from all over the world included everything from death threats to business propositions to offers to sell him WMDs. A choice quote from the article: 'One AOL user sent Saddam a one-word message: 'Imminent.' Attached to the Aug. 6 e-mail was a photograph of an atomic mushroom cloud.' I wonder what the login was." You'd think it was "press," password "press," but if it were that obvious I think someone would have said so.

WMD

[po8]

WMD = Weapon of Mass Destruction. Not obvious, IMHO.

Re:Yeah....how do you know that was his account?

[cdrudge]

If you would read the article about 5 paragraphs down, it tell you:

It's not clear whether Saddam uses e-mail or even knows how to operate a personal computer. But scores of people write to him each week at [e-mail], the e-mail address listed on the official homepage of the Iraqi presidency since at least October 2000.

I'm going to guess that "the e-mail address listed on the offical homepage of the Iraqi presidency" would be a good indicator it belongs to him.

_Saddam's_ inbox?

[crush]

I don't think so. It's clearly marked "Press". To most minds that would indicate that it is the inbox of some PR team.

Letter from Saddam

[Anonymous Coward]

in 2001 Saddam Hussein wrote a letter to an american.
http://www.uruklink.net/iraq/e2001/elet ter.htm
Just to nitpick:
"Your successive administrations have killed one billion and a half Iraqis in eleven years."
WOW, no wonder they have problems with all those people living underground :D

Re:Scary

[Iamthefallen]

Ah good point, but IF military action is taken, it's not enough to simply remove saddam, the entire government employed staff needs to be looked at, every cache of arms that could pose a threat be destroyed, a new system of government needs to be made, new police, new army etc etc etc. Basically, little will remain of the old Iraq except for the people and the borders. Therefore it will be a war on the nation, not against a person.

IF action is taken, it must be such that no one will have to go back and redo it again 10 years from now.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[Mr. Sketch]

Wow, you're right. All this time I thought it was 'set us up the bomb', but after checking the bible [allyourbase.org] you're right, it is is 'set up us the bomb'.

Someone should go back and moderate my previous post -1 Idiot.

Credit where credit is due, slightly OT

[Theodore Logan]

Just in case that is actually modded up and someone finds it funny, I didn't come up with it myself. I read it in a Plastic [plastic.com] discussion a while ago. I can't remember which, however, and I can't remember who said it, so I guess this isn't much help tracing down the original source. I just didn't want credit for such a brilliant acronym unless I came up with it myself.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[dpille]

on his best, most charitable, not-killing-people day

If you set parameters like that, I have to disagree. Rumsfeld says he's letting people go from Guantanamo, meaning that all those people who said wait, you can't just imprison people who may be innocent were almost on the money. They only missed the part where they used may be instead of are. If you pick a day where Saddam isn't actually killing people, he's obviously doing no worse than this.

I wouldn't have taken the poster literally- and with stuff like the above going on, his figurative point is easy to make.

Re:I DON'T GET IT

[Anonymous Coward]

From "Spaceballs":

[King Roland has given in to Dark Helmet's threats, and is telling him the combination to the "air shield"]
Roland: One.
Dark Helmet: One.
Sandurz: One.
Roland: Two.
Dark Helmet: Two.
Sandurz: Two.
Roland: Three.
Dark Helmet: Three.
Sandurz: Three.
Roland: Four.
Dark Helmet: Four.
Sandurz: Four.
Roland: Five.
Dark Helmet: Five.
Sandurz: Five.
Dark Helmet: So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard! That's the kind of combination an idiot would put on his luggage!

Later, it is revealed that President Skroob has the combination "12345" on his luggage.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[Lemmy Caution]

I can't stand Bush, but Bush is no Saddam. Saddam is a murderous thug, a gangster whose gang controls a country. It's as if Tony Soprano ran a country, but with fewer moral qualms. I don't think the US should be rattling its sabres and I don't think another war is warranted, but Saddam is still an asshole of the widest caliber.

That said, Iraq is probably the only Arab country where women can wear whatever they want, fully participate in political life (well, to the same limited, oppressed amount the men can, anyway) and have full legal equality in both professional and personal domains. It's better to be a woman in Iraq than to be one in Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or even Egypt. To some extent, that's due to the nature of the Baath party's platform, and also to the fact that Saddam is a very secular thug.

Re:Hoax?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you hear - the vote was unanimous.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[Skjellifetti]

That said, Iraq is probably the only Arab country where women can wear whatever they want, fully participate in political life (well, to the same limited, oppressed amount the men can, anyway) and have full legal equality in both professional and personal domains.

Bahrain [nytimes.com] held an election this week in which women could both vote and run for office.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[Hard_Code]

Not to argue with your conclusion, but:

doesn't gas its own citizens

Oh really?

US germ war tests on civilians [dissidentvoice.org]

Tuskegee syphilis experiment [pbs.org]
more [lp.org]

US eugenics program [commondreams.org]
more [africana.com]

Intentional radiation of civilians during nuclear testing [mothersalert.org]
more [radiationsurvivors.org]

Gulf War Syndrome, which was at first completely ignored and lied about, and finally recently acknowledged (although we still don't know what it is, nor do we know whether the government really knows or not - there have been accusations of experiments on our own soldiers).

not to mention:

Genocide of indigenous peoples as official policy [iearn.org]
by the way, this shit was [is?] still going on in uncomfortably recent history still going on [mit.edu]:

Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly prohibits

involuntary sterilization as means of "preventing births among" a
targeted population. Yet, in 1976, it was conceded by the
U.S. government that its ÒIndian Health ServiceÓ (IHS), then a
subpart of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was even then
conducting a secret program of involuntary sterilization which had
affected approximately forty percent of all Indian women of
childbearing age. The program was allegedly discontinued, and the IHS
was transferred to the Public Health Service, but no one was
punished. Hence, business as usual has continued in the ÒhealthÓ
sphere: 1990, for example, it came out that the IHS was inoculating
Inuit children in Alaska with Hepatitis-B vaccine. The vaccine had
already been banned by the World Health Organization as having a
demonstrated correlation with the HIV-virus which is itself correlated
to AIDS. As this is being written, a Òfield testÓ of Hepatitis-A
vaccine, also HIV-correlated, is being conducted on Indian
reservations in the northern Plains region.

Supposedly, Himmler kept a framed photograph of a Native American, as a reminder of the splendid example the United States provided.

The list goes on and on. Sure, Saddam may be a war criminal. But our own history is not so rosy...in fact it is pretty fucking disgusting and we need to wake up to that fact. We don't have the moral highground we profess to have. In fact Iraq's entire history pales in comparison to the atrocities that have been committed in the names of US citizens. This doesn't make either right. It makes both wrong.

No more hacking Saddam's inbox?

[Jouster]

So, rather than actually shutting down the ports in question, they just turn off DNS resolution for webmail.uruklink.net. Of course, their NS entries still exist, and a quick subnet scan on port 8383 (nice of them to choose an odd port number, wasn't it?) reveals that adding

62.32.60.16 webmail.uruklink.net

to your /etc/hosts (or C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for us Windows users) quite nicely lets us into the webmail system.

Alas, the user/pass is not "press"/"press", nor a mispelled "sadam"/"sadam". Ah, well.

Jouster

Re:No more hacking Saddam's inbox?

[Jouster]

And for those who care...

# nmap -vv -P0 -O -p 25,110,8383,8389 62.32.60.16 #webmail.uruklink.net

Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA31 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
No tcp,udp, or ICMP scantype specified, assuming vanilla tcp connect() scan. Use -sP if you really don't want to portscan (and just want to see what hosts are up).
Host (62.32.60.16) appears to be up ... good.
Initiating Connect() Scan against (62.32.60.16)
Adding open port 25/tcp
Adding open port 8383/tcp
Adding open port 110/tcp
The Connect() Scan took 12 seconds to scan 4 ports.
Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
For OSScan assuming that port 25 is open and port 33201 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 25 is open and port 39570 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 25 is open and port 39827 is closed and neither are firewalled
Interesting ports on (62.32.60.16):
Port State Service
25/tcp open smtp
110/tcp open pop-3
8383/tcp open unknown
8389/tcp filtered unknown

No OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
TCP/IP fingerprint:
SInfo(V=2.54BETA31%P=i386-redhat-lin ux-gnu%D=10/28 %Time=3DBD8674%O=25%C=-1)
TSeq(Class=TR%TS=0)
T1 (Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=564%ACK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=MNNT)
T2( Resp=N)
T3(Resp=N)
T4(Resp=N)
T5(Resp=N)
T6(Re sp=N)
T7(Resp=N)
PU(Resp=N)

TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=truly random
Difficulty=9999999 (Good luck!)
TCP ISN Seq. Numbers: 5E47AE5C A0B64F86 4F9BF508 BFC8A529 A3713D10 9EA869AA
IPID Sequence Generation: Busy server or unknown class

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 94 seconds

Jouster

Re:Uruks from Iraq?

[kldavis4]

Uruk [achilles.net] is a city in Iraq.

Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[Lemmy Caution]

Women are freer in Kuwait than in Saudi Arabia (talk about lowering the bar!), but still less than they are in Iraq, or even Iran (where women can and do vote and participate in the political sphere and hold office, even if they still have a very conservative dress code.)

Kuwait's biggest political problem is its failure to provide basic civil and political rights for the majority of its residents, of course - the majority of residents are non-Kuwaiti "guest workers".

Gaiacomm Technical Docs

[KlomDark]

I found their "technical" documentation [gaiacomm.org] - it was a wildly entertaining read, the ultimate in nonsense techno-babble. What in the hell is a "tetra-gigahertz"?

Great phrases like:

"Mathematical expressions have been eliminated to allow the reader to interpret the words and draw pictures in his mind to see what I, and so many others in the past have discovered but were afraid to write about or do until now."

"The frequency dependence of attenuation in the earth ionosphere wave-guide channel is known but will not be disclosed in this paper."

"If after reviewing all the this data including the above written data, if the reader still does not have a clear understanding then it is clear that the reader does not have the ability to think outside the circle (remember, my condition at the outset?)"

Definitions of acronyms like ATM and CDMA at the end, although none of those terms are discussed in the document.

Read it, laugh your head off! :)

GWB more evil than SH - Pix!

[davesag]

you say US government doesn't maintain a specially horrific prision for the children of dissidents, doesn't gas its own citizens, doesn't execute military officers by the hundreds, doesn't explicitly repress free speech, etc.

• some history for you.
• the US govt imprisons more of its own citizens per capita than any other country in the world [usdoj.gov], and the number of children in us prisons [usdoj.gov] is on the rise. Many of these prisons would rate as "horrific", especially for kids.
• There are many documented instances of the US gassing their own people. here's just one [angelfire.com] and didn't the russians just gas their own people too? and for the record those kurds supposedly gassed by Iraq were actually gassed by Iran [globalissues.org] with US and british supplied weapons.
• actually the US does execute miltary officers by the hundreds. in fact the US executed thousands of retreating iraqi soldiers [twf.org] in 1991. Not onlty that but the US is guilty of political assasination, car bombing, torture, and general mayhem associated with their ongoing war of terror. I mean Nixon and Kissinger and Rumsfeld actually extended the vietnam war (95% civillian casualties) by years just to get Nixon elected.
• and finally to say the US doesn't repress free speech is too much of a joke. even google is staffed by NSA spooks. self censorship is at an all time high - wake up and smell what your are shovelling. If the press in the US were really free you'd probably know a bit more about your own evil soaked government and their clients.

george w bush and his oil coup cronies are far more evil than saddam could ever hope to be.

- Demand regime change in the USA now.

Re:Password? in english?

[sfe_software]

Actually, I kinda assumed that the press@ address is, most likely, an alias that points to a similar Arabic-worded address. I could see that easily. If you have visitors from English-speaking countries, you'd have an English contact address (just like how they have an English version of the site).

If the site weren't slashdotted I'd try to find the corresponding "Contact" link on the Arabic version, to verify this...

The article didn't say that the username/password was a 5-letter *English* word -- just that it was 5 letters. That "press" happens to also be 5 letters is probably just coincidence, as if it were press/press I'm sure it would have been hacked a long, long time ago...