US Presidential Campaign Hacktivism: first Palin, now O'Reilly

Davey Winder
Saturday, 20 September 2008 20:42

Your IT - Home IT

Visitors to the conservative Fox News reporter Bill O'Reilly's website might be forgiven for thinking all was as normal. Yet more than 200 of its paid subscribers details have been posted in public after the site was hacked, apparently in retaliation over comments O'Reilly made following the Sarah Palin email hack.

The US Presidential election trail was always going to be a dirty one. The notion of an open and transparent campaign really is sweet, but laughable. Things have started to get really muddy this week though, when the hackers got involved.

First up we had the story of Sarah Palin and her hacked free Yahoo! webmail account. The Republican US Vice-Presidential candidate had apparently been doing official business via her personal Yahoo! email to avoid it becoming part of the public record.

Naughty naughty. When hackers exposed this by posting copies of some of those emails on the Wikileaks website, the reaction was predicable from both sides of the political fence.

There was outrage from the Democrats, mixed with not a little bit of relief to see La Palin stepping in the smelly stuff and hope that enough would stick to make her less appealing to the electorate come November.

There was also outrage from the Republicans. Not that the Vice Presidential hopeful had been implicated in some potentially illegal email activity in order to bypass Alaskan freedom of information laws, oh no.

The Republicans were outraged that someone had hacked the email account, called it a despicable act and set the big dogs of the FBI straight onto it.

Another Republican attack dog, also known as Fox News political commentator Bill O'Reilly, was let loose and savaged Wikileaks, calling it "one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites."

Just two days after the Sarah Palin hack was revealed, we can now reveal that the Bill O'Reilly website has fallen victim to the same thing. The motive would appear to be retaliation for those barbed remarks on Fox News.

Wikileaks has posted proof of the hack in the form of a screenshot showing the admin interface and private details of subscribers.

It says "Hacktivists, thumbing their noses at the pundit, took control of O'Reilly's main site, BillOReilly.com. According to our source, the security protecting O'Reilly's site and subscribers was "non-existent".

The Register reports that no credit card information was stolen from the site, and that it has since been "completely locked down" in response to the incident.

However, for once, Bill O'Reilly and his website are keeping quiet. There is no mention, at the time of writing, of the successful hack to be seen or heard.

It does make me wonder if the Republicans have any hackers at all though? Where is the juicy Biden IM log or the Obama YouTube outtake roll?