PBS Web Sites and Databases Hacked 387
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the hacker-supported-news dept.
from the hacker-supported-news dept.
wiredmikey writes "Late Sunday night, hackers gained access to several areas of PBS Web servers and were able publish a fake news story on a PBS news blog. The group also published PBS internal user login information that they were able to siphon out of PBS databases. The fake story was about rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996 after being shot in Las Vegas, being been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand. A group going by the name of 'LulzSec' claimed responsibility for the hack, saying the attack was a protest against a PBS Frontline broadcast last week about WikiLeaks."
Re:Manning is a hero. (Score:0, Informative)
Manning is not a hero.
Re:Once apon a time (Score:5, Informative)
Now I find it illuminating. It seems that too much effort is spent making Javascript animated menus and Flash sliding widgets and not enough effort is spent on patches, updates, and decent password policy. Corporate culture prioritizes pretty pictures to sell us more shit we don't need. Meanwhile our personal information - and therefore capacity to buy said shit - is in danger of being leaked.
The Javascript animated menus and Flash widgets are cheap. They're (largely) a one-time cost that is often subsidized by being the same underlying code being packaged and sold to multiple clients. Hire someone to deploy a customized CMS and voila - done.
Patching, updating, and enforcing standards is expensive. You have to hire people to constantly follow the process. Those processes take paid hours. If you're doing it right, you're hiring staff that aren't also implementing aforementioned systems serving menus and widgets. And to avoid down-time and (most) ugly surprises, it takes additional investment in infrastructure as well.
You're right in so far as organizations often get it wrong. But flashy widgets is not the reason.
Re:Manning is a hero. (Score:5, Informative)
You're an authoritarian fool, and a tool. Manning also swore an oath to defend the Constitution, something both Democrats and Republicans have been using for a snot rag since 911. Manning unveiled government lawbreaking, corruption and deception.
Re:Once apon a time (Score:4, Informative)
Non-profit status means that no-one who invests money gets a return on it. Your premise is essentially that people who invest labor shouldn't get compensation and that is absurd - there is no organization of any significant size in the world where the people who do the work are purely volunteers. Even priests get paid.
Being a non-proifit does NOT make an organization qualify for government hand-outs - hell, PLENTY of for-profit orgs qualify for government hand-outs. I'd even go so far as to wager that most government hand-outs in the USA go to for-profit corps. All that "non-profit' status means is that donations aren't taxed.