FoxNews Commentator`s BillOreilly.com Website Hacked, Subscribers Personal Details Published
Unknown intruders have hacked the website of conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers. The breach into BillOreilly.com came as retaliation for remarks O’Reilly made on FoxNews condemning the attack on Palin’s Yahoo email account, according to Wikileaks, a site that makes it easy for hackers and anyone else to leak documents. BillOreilly.com charges $4.95 for monthly premium membership. The O’Reilly Store sells hats, mugs, T-shirts and other merchandise.
As proof, Wikileaks posted a screenshot of the BillOreilly.com administrative interface that showed the names, email addresses, passwords, and home town of 20 subscribers of the website. In all, information belonging to 205 subscribers was intercepted, according to Eric Marston, CTO of Nox Solutions, the company that maintained the O’Reilly website.
The hack came in response to comments O’Reilly made on Fox News about the posting of contents of Palin’s email account, including pictures of her daughter and her contact list. The hackers were able to access the unsecured list by trying a large number of variations of the website’s administrative URL. All affected members have received an email and a phone call informing them of the breach and urging them to change their password anywhere they may have used it. No credit card information was stolen, and the site has since been completely locked down.
“I’m not going to mention the website that posted this, but it’s one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites,” O’Reilly said, according to this snippet from YouTube. “Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can’t they go there tonight to the guy’s house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him?”
It’s evident from the remark that no one bothered to tell O’Reilly that Wikileaks, the first site to publish the Palin email, is a multi-national, bulletproof organization that has successfully withstood serious take-down efforts before. While the information exposed on Wikileaks may seem minimal, it has the potential to imperil the BillOreilly.com subscribers listed in ways they may not have anticipated.
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Please give Obama’s Press Secretary equal time with Kennedy for his “UMMMMS.”