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.

Other good news for Saddam

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Jambunju of Nigeria needs his help getting his family's money out of the country, and if Saddam helps, he will get half of it.

Plus, thanks to the miracle of herbal viagra, he'll soon be able to sustain an erection all night, and please many women in bed!

hmmm

[pizza_milkshake]

hmmm Saddam wasn't using AOL? he may be more dangerous than we thought.

Re:hmmm

[C0LDFusion]

Of course not. Haven't you heard? Iraq OnLine is the 137,000,000th hottest internet service provider, serving all of 2 people (Saddam and the hacker)for the past decade! And it's growing fast! With new Dictator Controls, it's easier for Saddam to choose what access you have. And e-mail is a snap. Just ask the guy who hacked his inbox!

Uruks from Iraq?

[merriam]

I'm confused. Is Saddam breeding orcs now?

Re:Uruks from Iraq?

[user flynn]

Send this message to Saddam:

Uruk Hi!

Somebody set us up the bomb.
We get signal.
What happen?
Main Screen, turn on.
It's you!
How are you? All your base are belong to us!
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say?!?
You have no chance of survive! Make your time! muhahah muhahahaha!
You know what you doing!!!
Move oil for great justice!

Sincerely,
George W. Bush

Sounds like something from a GW press conference :).

Re:Uruks from Iraq?

[TedCheshireAcad]

All your joke are old to us.

Re:Uruks from Iraq?

[kldavis4]

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

Re:hmmm

[ncc74656]

hmmm Saddam wasn't using AOL? he may be more dangerous than we thought.

Has anyone checked to see if the password is 12345 [imdb.com]?

Re:hmmm

[superyooser]

The real proof that Saddam is evil (from a web developer's perspective):

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage5.0">

Also, they're using Microsoft-authored Java classes using the deprecated applet element.

<applet code="fphover.class"

and they're obviously anti-/. too. ;-)

codebase="./"

Worst of all, there's no DOCTYPE declaration, without which, a validator does not know which HTML version to expect. This means that Iraq has no intention of complying with international web standards.

I'm waiting for the U.N. to send in Web Inspectors.

Hoax?

[RAMMS+EIN]

I can't help but think this is bogus. What exactly is _Saddam_'s Inbox? Does _he_ read that mail, or do his subordinates? Anyway...interesting, no matter if it's true or not.

Re:Hoax?

[Unknown Bovine Group]

I agree. A hoax or an intentional plant on Hussein's part. I immediately thought of the "orgy of evidence" line from Minority Report.

On the other hand, if it's true, whomever "hacked" the account and told the press probably only duplicated a hack already done by the NSA, and caused Saddam to close the hole. Good job, bonehead!

Re:Hoax?

[HerringFlavoredFowl]

I vote Red Herring ...

Re:Hoax?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, like the article says, the address is the Iraqi equivalent of "[e-mail]". (As opposed to "[e-mail]", which is something quite different. ;) So what it means, no doubt, is that a bunch of low-level employees do a first pass through it, filter out all the spam and death threats, then pass it onto their slightly less low-level superiors, who filter out most of the rest of it and write up summaries, then pass it on ... [repeat n times] ... until Saddam gets a one-page summary on his desk and maybe a couple of really interesting letters, like the one from an American to which he (supposedly) wrote a personal reply.

Iraq's government is very, very different from ours in a lot of ways (duh) but it's still a government, and thus a bureaucracy, and all bureaucracies have certain aspects in common. The people who read the e-mail addressed to "[e-mail]" and those who read the e-mail addressed to "[e-mail]" would probably be able to fit quite nicely into each other's jobs.

Re:Hoax?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iraq's government is very, very different from ours in a lot of ways

Yeah --- the guy they voted for got to be President.

Re:Hoax?

[bhsx]

It's not over yet! The 0.1% of those who voted for "Not Saddam" are calling for a recount of the Floridastan votes.

Re:Hoax?

[shogun]

We change our regime every 4 years

I'm not an American but I'd like to point out that occasionally swapping between Democrats and Republicans is NOT a regime change.

Here is the WHOIS note contact [e-mail]

[Brigadier]

Kinda wierd to think the most clear and present danger to the free world uses a yahoo address for there administrators.

Registrar:domaininfo.com
Domain Name: URUKLINK.NET

[Owner of domain name]
osama khalid
27 april street
baghdad, 0000
IQ

[Administrative contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ

Email: [e-mail]
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

[Technical contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ

Email: [e-mail]
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

[Zone contact]
khalid, osama
27 april street
0000 baghdad
IQ

Email: [e-mail]
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Record created: 29 May 2000
Record last changed: 22 Nov 2001
Record expires: 29 May 2005

Nameserver: nic1.warkaa.com (62.32.60.1)
Nameserver: nic2.warkaa.com (62.32.60.2)

Re:Here is the WHOIS note contact [e-mail]

[danimrich]

They even use Frontpage!
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage5 .0">

Does this mean that M$ is bad or that Saddam's web "designers" are stupid?

Re:Here is the WHOIS note contact [e-mail]

[zephc]

it means that MS supports terrorists! Or... something... :-D

Re:Hoax?

[stefanlasiewski]

Duh! Saddam doesn't read his email, one of the "Saddam Lookalikes" reads the email, and occasionally responds... so I guess you could call them "Saddam Typealikes".

Re:Hoax?

[dattaway]

Its a hoax until I see links to mirrors of his inbox. It would be for historical purposes of course...

Re:Hoax?

[Genjurosan]

For some reason, I just don't see Saddam reading e-mail. What exactly would he expect? An outlook invite to the lunch and learn session on advanced tourture methods in the atomic conference room? Or perhaps he gives out his card at political functions so that people can e-mail him new ideas about how to fund terrorist operations without the world knowing about it.

--
Saddam Hussein
President, god, and super nice guy (because I said so).
Iraq, country of milk and honey
(964)(1) 718-9267 (phone)
(964)(1) 885-2286 (fax)

"This issue is not inspectors, the issue is disarmament."

- GWB

Re:Hoax?

[timeOday]

You're missing the point. The joke is not on Saddam, but on all those well-wishers, detractors, and would-be business partners who sent him mail. I found the excerpts very entertaining.

All Saddam's email are belong to us!

[leviramsey]

Hack inbox for great justice

Seriously, when are people going to learn that short usernames with the username as the password are a bad idea? Maybe the US should bomb everybody whose email is stupidly secured like that?

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

[Mr. Sketch]

Maybe the US should bomb everybody whose email is stupidly secured like that?

I think you mean the US should set him up the bomb.

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

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

I think you mean the US should set him up the bomb.

Your grammar is atrocious! For future reference:
"I think you mean the US should set up him the bomb."

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.

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

[Dirtside]

Yeah... whenever you're trying to remember which of two forms an AYB quote takes, just think about which one has more grammatical errors, and that's your quote. :)

Makes you wonder...

[Dog and Pony]

... what Saddam's "zig" is...

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

[iocat]

It's offtopic, but I had to respond:

An objective analysis of both W's record and Saddam's record reaveals that Saddam has a much worse record on human rights. It's funny and popular to say otherwise on Campus, maybe, but last time I checked, the 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. Which the Iraqi government, controlled by Hussein, does.

Regardless of whether or not attacking Iraq is a good idea, saying what you said kind of makes you seem like a moron, because it's absolutely factually incorrect, and it lessens the impact of any argument you try to make.

The worst Republican, on his worst, conspiracy-laden, evil, money-grubbing day is better than Saddam Hussein on his best, most charitable, not-killing-people day.

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: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.

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

[etymxris]

I really don't think it's fair to compare the Iraq of today with the US of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. As for the more recent "atrocities" you mention:

• We don't know what caused Gulf War Syndrome, or if the US government is responsible. The only evidence of a coverup is the evidence that the symptoms are so vague that no one even thought to look at it as a separate illness until sometime after the war.
  
• Doing bad things with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons before we knew the dire consequences of using them is one thing. But it is another thing to use such weapons on civilians when you know exactly what the effects will be.
  
• That the US government was giving Hep B vaccines to Inuit children in a covert attempt to increase incidence of AIDS among that racial group during the 1990's is just ludicrous. It may very well be that there are bad side effects to the Hep B vaccine, and it may be that the US government was negligent in exploring the effects of such vaccines, but to say that the use of the Hep B vaccine was done intentionally and solely for the purpose of giving Inuit people AIDS is just ludicrous, and I'll regard it as such until you can come up with better evidence.
  

an aside

[Luyseyal]

A friend of mine was in the Gulf War -- US Army infantry. He said he and all his buds were "encouraged" (i.e., berated by the sargeant until they did it) to sign a waiver and receive an injection of non-FDA-approved anthrax vaccine. I've wondered if this had a possibile relation to Gulf War Syndrome. Any idea?

-l

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

[Hard_Code]

Point 1: Granted. Gulf War Syndrome is still vague and relatively little is known about it. But the government DID now that lots of soldiers were complaining about it. They first ignored them, then told them there was no such thing, and now, whatever the heck it is, the government is finally admitting there may be something to the claims (whether or not the military did something intentionally, or the soldiers were exposed to enemy chemical agents, etc.). The point is, the government was willfully disinterested in GWS.

Point 2: Forgive me if I reserve a healthy skepticism of the naivete and innocence of those who perpetrated "accidental" civilian casualties and ailments during the course of experimentation. Vague enemies on the other side of the planet are eternally convenient, yet, inexcusable, reasons for such behavior.

Point 3: I never made the claim, and neither does the article, that the US was trying to infect any group with AIDS. The point is, the US has been in violation of the Genocide Convention (I was not aware of this particular convention), perpetrating involuntary sterilizations as recently as 1976! With similar callousness, according to this article, the US apparently used sub-par or experimental vaccines on Native Americans.

I didn't make this stuff up. Just because they don't teach it to you in namby pamby middle school US history doesn't mean it is not real. Search Google yourself. Better yet search your library. This stuff is historical fact, not speculation. We just refuse to acknowledge the dirty portions of our past...which I think does ourselves a disservice - especially when we expect to use our moral highground to sidestep international law and treaties to "do the right thing".

As far as our history with dealing with Native Americans, I suggest:

Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years [amazon.com]

The sooner we dislodge the fantastic myth, and somberly acknowledge and admit to our real past, the sooner we become a better people.

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

[Fjord]

One thing to consider is that a lot of these atrocities don't come out in the open until many years later. 50 years from now, there may be someone else in another forum saying "I really don't think it's fair to compare the X of today with the US of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago"

Plus, a lot of these were less than 50 years ago. The Sarin, Soman, Tabun and VX civilian tests were from 1962-1973 and the Native eugenics was in 1976. That was only 12 years before Saddam used Sarin on the Kurds.

The original poster is certainly wrong when they said GW is worse than Saddam, but GW's only been in power for 2 years, Saddam's been there for 23. I think if you add up all the atrocities the U.S. government has done in the last 23 years (known and unknown, to it's own people and to foreigners) it would outpace what Saddam has done in that time, but then again, the U.S. has a lot more influence over the world.

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: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!

[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".

Hear that?

[browser_war_pow]

That's the sound of some poor Iraqi IT worker's neck getting H@X0r3d...........

Re:Hear that?

[Ubergrendle]

I only wish this were a joke. Didn't their soccer team get beatings for a poor international performance? I think there is more than enough precedence to think that this might happen. Perhaps someone in the world is to be executed for deploying an unpatched IIS...scary.

That's not scary, THIS is scary

[vaxer]

Perhaps someone in the world is to be executed for deploying an unpatched IIS...scary.

Scarier still is the idea that someone who deployed an unpatched IIS would not be executed.

Password

[swordboy]

The strange thing is that he uses the exact same password that I use on my luggage!

Password? in english?

[Jonny Balls]

Don't you think his password wouldn't be in ENGLISH?

Re:Password? in english?

[dr_dank]

C'mon, don't let facts get in the way of a good story.

Remember our friend from last year [slashdot.org]?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna play some Doom 3.

Re:Password? in english?

[babbage]

What, so "press" is the Arabic word for a journalistic contact address now? What a cognate!!

You make a valid point, but English does seem to be the lingua franca of the interweb, even (apparently) among contries at the "axes of evil". The site seems to largely be in English, so the people running it presumably are English speakers as well. I can say, just from some of the foreign-born students I've known, that people that learn a technical subject in a particular language will tend to think in that language when practicing the craft, even if otherwise they speak something else. (For example, a Russian friend who studied aeronautical engineering as his father did, but couldn't discuss the subject with his dad because he only knew the English terms for everything & didn't know how to express the same concepts in his native language.)

So, like I say, I think your point is insightful, but at the same time I don't think it's unreasonable that the un/pw would have been English terms if the rest of the site was also English (as, from the little I poked around, it seems to be).

WMD

[po8]

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

Re:WMD

[Pike65]

Oh OK.

. . . . How exactly do you send someone an e-mail trying to sell them a weapon of mass distruction?

Sadam,
You have been approved.
You can receive a thermo-nuclear warhead!
Did You Know?
-There are No special requirements to obtain these weapons.
-These are weapons that you NEVER have to repay!

Sadam,You Qualify!
Click Here
Limited Time Offer!

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.

Mod parent down (was: Re:Mod parent up)

[Theodore Logan]

Agreed. It wastes a lot of people's time when editors or story authors (in the absense of competent editors) try to show how "with it" they are by not expanding acronyms, especially when they have not recently been used in a slashot headline.

You could not possibly be serious. If you have read any single issue of any newspaper during the last year you must have seen that acronym. And the latter part of your comment is just hilarious. It hasn't featured in a Slashdot headline, so you couldn't know about it? Want them to clarify who Saddam is too? He doesn't frequent Slashdot headlines all to often either.

Sorry for flamebating/trolling/whatever, but really, try to get out of your cubicle just a little more often, willya?

I wonder....

[JoeLinux]

Hmm...this would make for a good fark contest: Make a email that might be in Saddam's inbox.

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]

Subject: Hahahahaha

Prepare your Camels, 'cause we're about to get medeviel on your scud-launching ass. And if you use Bio weapons, you won't stop glowing for a LONG time. And don't think you can bankrupt us. We use weapons on you, we order more, our side gets more jobs. So let us in, or we'll come down on you like the hand of god.

Party on,

GWB

Re:I wonder....

[Malcontent]

If it mentioned oil I could have sworn dubya himself wrote that email. Grammer mistakes and all.

Re:I wonder....

[JoeLinux]

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]

Subject: Re: Hahahahaha

Forgot to add: If you are going to send the big bad Republican Guard after us, please be sure to equip them with white flags and THEIR own hand restraints. It was quite annoying last time to have to resort to plastic ties.

Oh, oh, and please pass out white flags. We'd hate to accidently kill one of the many thousands trying to surrender.

And once again, use bio weapons on us, and we'll do something truly evil back: Feed your people. Including the Kurds.

We have food
Are you afraid?
Down with Iraq
Down with Iraq

GWB.

Re:I wonder....

[sql*kitten]

Party on

You know, I can't help but thinking that in another time and another place, Saddam and Dubya would have been good buddies, probably frat brothers. They both have an insatiable appetite for the good life, they both make all their money from oil, they both affect a religious piety when it suits them, they both love to be a "man of the people". This isn't as unlikely as it sounds, George Bush junior once owned a company (Arbusto Energy) jointly with one of Osama bin Laden's many brothers.

What the world really needs is for one of Dubya's daughters (not Jenna, the other one) and one of Saddam's sons to fall in love. Then, after many Baz Luhrmann-esque antics their fathers can be reconciled, and live happily ever after on a ranch in the sovereign state of Texraq.

Re:I wonder....

[mikerich]

kinda like how austin powers and doctor evil went to school together?

With Tony Blair co-starring as Mini Me?

My god it's all starting to make sense!

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:I wonder....

[grammar fascist]

I think you both forget that Osama's entire family has disowned him.

Gotta love guilt by association.

Re:I wonder....

[babbage]

An obvious forgery, there aren't nearly enough typos, grammatical errors, garbled logic, etc. It is well known that the real GWB write at a 2nd grade level, but this is solid 5th grade stuff. Nice try... :-)

CONFIDENTIAL PURPOSE

[limekiller4]

Yes, but did he get any business propositions from Nigeria.

That's what I want to know.

Have I been trolled?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Well duh. This is basically the equivilent of someone cracking the "secret" password to Santa's email box on northpole.net.

This isn't Saddam's address. It's his press handlers address. That's like judging me based on the feedback send to my [e-mail] address.

Re:Have I been trolled?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> That's like judging me...

It's not about judging Sadam but judging the kind of folks that think they're sending him email.

Online dating..

[DCram]

How else do you think Saddam got hooked up with Satan! Does anyone else think that Saddam's harsh treatment of satan was just another example of why we should nuke the bastard :)

It just strikes me funny to think of Saddam illegaly downloading mp3's and such and cackling insanely about driving our economy to the brink.

Great Onion Headline:

[bobdotorg]

U.N. Inspectors in Iraq find secret cache of MP3's. Invasion to start immediately. Hilary Rosen blah blah blah...

What does Saddam's SPAM look like??

[Gefiltefish11]

TO: Saddam Hussein or unnamed email recipient

FR: Devry Universit

Subj: Boost your career with a Bachelor's or Master's degree in nuclear technology!!

he got this email too

[commodoresloat]

Hi! How are you?

I send you this plutonium in order to have your advice.

See you later. Thanks

Woo...

[AlephNot]

The first time I read the title, I read it as "Saddam's xbox hacked". You can imagine the look of surprise on my face...

Re:Woo...

[crush]

I thought the Iraqis used PS2s?

Could it be a plant?

[CoolVibe]

As in, something some cockamany person set up to "discredit" Iraq more? I'd really like to take a good long hard deep look at the mail headers of mails in the inbox to check for forged stuff...

I think it's a hoax.

_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.

CIA In Trouble

[isa-kuruption]

Some CIA agent is now sitting in his office crying because he kept putting off installing that backdoor onto the mail server thinking, "his password will never change!"

According to the USA Patriot Act

[Dutchie]

Breaking into a government system constitutes terrorism. I wonder if this applies to breaking into foreign government systems.

My favorite message

[bryan1945]

Some California CEO of a wireless tech company wrote- "In a press release dated Sept. 13, the company said it has developed "4G" wireless technology capable of being used "as a weapon to ignite large sections of the atmosphere and incinerate all living creatures within its pre-selected coordinates." "

And I'll raise you a "5G" and a Death Star

That's nothing !

[AftanGustur]

I hacked Mr Bush's email box, and I found a letter with This Picture [tviund.is], signed "-- Saddam".

examples of leaders' bad passwords...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

King of the Druids: "One... Two... Three... Four... Five."

Dark Helmet: "That sounds like the combination an idiot would have on his luggage!"


<snip>

President Scrooge: "One two three four five? I can't believe it! I have the same combination on my luggage!"

Y2K-Not OK!

[phawley]

from article:

The version of webmail software used by the Iraqi ISP is known to have several security holes -- but the patches available for them do not appear to have been applied.


from uruklink.net website:

October28 ,102

like Y2K? ;)

In related news

[Theodore Logan]

Saddam's personal homepage is right now being subjected to what appears to be a large scale DDOS attack. After Saddam has butchered his sysadmin and the hackers, he's coming for you Jamie...

So who exactly did the hacking?

[Dan Crash]

Did Brian McWilliams, author of the article, do the actual hacking? Or was he just informed of it by some skript kiddie? The article is mysteriously vague about who did the deed.

Assuming they did do the hacking, this is ethical... how? Does this mean they figure it's all right to hack into anyone's e-mail and publicize the results? What if it were your e-mail?

It may have been a nifty trick that someone happened to guess the right password, but as journalism, this is beyond the pale. I'd like to see someone from WIRED News comment a little more specifically on who the hacker was, why his or her name wasn't disclosed, and how WIRED justifies reporting on the hacked contents of an e-mail account, and where they draw the lines.

Journalistically speaking,

[Jerf]

To play Devil's advocate, from a journalistic point of view, Wired's primary responsibility is to validate the source of the info. Once that is done, you can make a very good case that this is, at least potentially, the sort of thing that People Must Know, which overrides most other considerations.

The contents were probably awfully mundane, perhaps too much so to qualify for The People Must Know, but one could imagine at least in theory that they might have found something interesting in there.

There is precedent for this: For a big example, consider the Watergate scandal. The New York Times wasn't "supposed" to be in possession of that material, and they certainly weren't "supposed" to publish it, but The People Must Know overrode their reservations, and most of us would consider that the right decision based on the info they had at the time.

On the other hand, hacking into my email and telling the world about it would be unethical; there is no need for anybody to know what's in there, so they'd just be rumormongering.

What, you say this "The People Need To Know" is an awfully fuzzy [jerf.org] criterion to be using? Damn straight! These ethical things are hard.

(Remember, I'm playing devil's advocate here; I don't believe it's black and white, but I do think there is a strong kernel of truth here.)

All involved US corporate leaders arrested!

[erroneus]

Some of these commercial offers might even be considered high treason.

I hope that all U.S. corporate leaders involved are immediately arrested and charged with treason or some other appropriate offense. This is wrong on so many levels it churns my stomach. The arrogance of these people astound me to no end.

I sincerely hope this is a hoax but somehow I can see that it's possible.

If there is truth to U.S. business attempting to solicit business with Saddam Hussein, then I expect to see reports of arrests and investigations in the news. But I can already hear the paper shreading machines in operations and the degausing machines humming...

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! :)

Still vulnerable?

[m0i]

It looks like uruklink.net is still vulnerable:
-port 110 is opened
-it reveals they're running Ipswitch IMail 7.07
-this software has a known overflow and exploit on the web client side
-http://mail.uruklink.net:8383/ is opened.

What are their sysadmin waiting to shut down 110/8383? Wake up!

Side note, it's funny to see that they are running an american OS and mail software..

Re:Still vulnerable?

[daeley]

What are their sysadmin waiting to shut down 110/8383? Wake up!

Somehow, I doubt they're sleeping, nor their families, except in the morbid, metaphorical sense of 'to sleep' that Hamlet uses in his soliloquy. :)

Re:Still vulnerable?

[tswinzig]

Side note, it's funny to see that they are running an american OS and mail software..

Yes, astoundingly they didn't feel like using anything from the huge Iraqi software market!

Some people just have no sense...

[coupland]

The part I thought most comical was the people writing to warn him that the CIA would be after him and to exercise caution, or with ideas on how to win a war. Yes, I'm sure Saddam fired off a hardcopy of that e-mail, brought it to his War Ministry and they all read it in awe.

"By the grace of Almighty Allah, [e-mail] has shown us the road to salvation!"

Jeez, people can be so dumb...

/. is a weapon of mass destruction....

[Ashurbanipal]

...that we have now loosed on Iraq's feeble Internet connection.

President Skroob

[Junior J. Junior III]

That's incredible! I have that same combination on my luggage!

Official Body Count!

[EggplantMan]

Deaths directly linked to the (mis)use of:
IIs : 1
Apache : 0

Is using IIs really worth the risk? Please, think before you deploy IIs.

Ominous date

[f97tosc]

Attached to the Aug. 6 e-mail was a photograph of an atomic mushroom cloud.' It is probably not a coincidence that Aug 6 was the 1945 date that the nuke was dropped on Hiroshima.

Tor

The password is...

[jabber01]

1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. 5..

Same as the code on G.W. Bush's luggage.

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:No more hacking Saddam's inbox?

[Jouster]

I love it!

The changes are propogating across DNS now... "webmail.uruklink.net" is now a private address in the 10.0.0.0/8 class A!

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: mailserv.uruklink.net
Address: 10.0.0.16
Aliases: webmail.uruklink.net

Jouster

New way to combat spammers..

[James_G]

Saddam's inbox also contained several solicitations from American companies hoping to do business with Iraq -- despite U.S. prohibitions and United Nations trade sanctions.

To: Saddam, Subject: MAKE MONEY FAST!!!
To: Saddam, Subject: Generic Viagra! $2.50 each!
To: Saddam, Subject: Increase your penis size!

Wouldn't it be so nice to close down spammers because they're breaching UN trade sanctions? Maybe you could even get them charged with treason.. Muahahaha

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.

Re:Scary

[Iamthefallen]

Contrary to popular american beliefs, Europe is NOT pro-Iraq, we're just not as keen on resorting to force nowadays since we saw the result of it at home.
The US hasn't in modern times seen widespread destruction on home turf, we still remember it vividly.

If the US could prove to European leaders (and European population) that Iraq is indeed the threat the US makes it out to be, then I'm sure European nations would also support military action and possibly be a part of it, as most have stated, they want a UN mandate first. But, the "He dun tried to kill mah paw" argument isn't that convincing on the European side of the pond.

Re:Scary

[pubjames]

Contrary to popular american beliefs, Europe is NOT pro-Iraq, we're just not as keen on resorting to force nowadays since we saw the result of it at home.

Hey guys, just to make the argument clearer could you please make a distinction between Saddam and his cronies and the people/country of Iraq. I'm sure many Europeans (and hopefully Americans) would consider themselves pro-Iraq if we are talking about the country and people, but anti-Iraq if we are talking about Saddam and his cronies.

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:Scary

[TheCaptain]

Contrary to popular american beliefs, Europe is NOT pro-Iraq, we're just not as keen on resorting to force nowadays since we saw the result of it at home.


I would have hoped you also saw the result of NOT using force when it should have been...like keeping Hitler from rearming after WWI.

I am not trying to be a troll or leave the wrong impression, but Saddam and his crew are not the types you want to have that kinda stuff. The U.N. knows it and made resolutions to prevent it...unfortunately, none of them are being enforced.

There were agreements made to stop the last war...like weapons inspectors that wouldn't be interferred with etc. Saddam isn't abiding by his side of the deal, so the other side isn't bound to the ceasefire either. This has very little to do with GWB wanting to kill him because of his father...and that is a really really lame accusation, IMHO.

Re:Pearl Harbor ring a bell?

[Samrobb]

America hasn't got enough 'history' and so can't understand these things.

No - we have more than enough history... your history, as a matter of fact. We understand these things very well, thank you, which is why we go to great lengths to keep our homeland from experiencing the sort of things that have happened elsewhere in the world.

So - what next? Are you going to claim that only someone who dies from lung cancer is smart enough to know that smoking is dangerous?

Re:Fake?

[tx_mgm]

most hated man in america for several years running? i think not.
about a year ago, the most hated man in america was, without a doubt, another mid-eastern man.
and he probably still should be, too.
but hey, since we can't find him, lets listen to dubya and go finish daddy's business so we can get that pesky economy off of our minds!
*end sarcasm*

Re:Free weather service

[BoneFlower]

Reminds me of a joke about Afghanistan:

Q: Whats the 7 day forecast for Afghanistan?

A: Three days.