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RIAA Website Wiped Clean by “Hackers”

by TorrentFreak (repost)
Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site.
riaa-error.jpg
It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. This would seem unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

For now it sure does look like all the content has been wiped from the RIAA homepage. Let’s hope they have backups, or not.
§TPB Link
by TorrentFreak (repost)
riaa-tpb.jpg
A link to The Pirate Bay was injected to the RIAA site.

From Wikipedia:
The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 169 (as of January 3, 2008) in the Alexa ranking list of the world's most-visited internet sites.

The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån ('The Pirate Bureau') in early 2004, but since October 2004 it has been a separate organization. The site is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm ("Anakata"), Fredrik Neij ("TiAMO") and Peter Sunde ("brokep").

On May 31, 2006, the site's servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, causing it to be offline for three days. Later it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands -- The Pirate Bay has since taken measures to ensure a restoration time of hours rather than days. On June 14, 2006 the Swedish newspaper SvD reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to "pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands]." Upon reopening, the site's number of visitors doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertising revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. Directly after the raid, the advertisements generated about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.

The raid, alleged to be politically motivated and under pressure from the MPAA, was reported as a success by the MPAA in the immediate aftermath, but with the site being restored within days and the raising of the debate in Swedish culture, The Pirate Bay and other commentators considered it "highly unsuccessful".
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