The cracker who broke into the Web servers of open source development site SourceForge has broken cover to boast of his exploits, and brag he also compromised the systems of the Apache project.

Fluffy Bunny defaced a Web site (themes.org) to list the accounts he had managed to compromise and to brag that his actions had gone unnoticed by SourceForge administrators for five months (against the week SourceForge has publicly admitted). The defacement has since been removed but can still be seen (thankfully minus confidential account information) on defacement archive Alldas.de
here

According to the posting, Fluffy Bunny obtained passwords and user names for SourceForge accounts after successfully placing a Trojan horse program on a Secure Shell (SSH) server. Apparently this was possible because Fluffy Bunny had already compromised the servers run by an ISP.

Gaining control of this SSH server, which provides a Unix command line interface for remote administration of Web servers, allowed Fluffy Bunny (in his words) to "sniff my way onto apache.org and SourceForge Web server and leave all sorts of goodies in the code".

Brian Behlendorf, president of the Apache Software Foundation, has sent a posting to developers admitting that its servers have been compromised but also downplaying fears that source code had been modified. He makes a pretty convincing argument here that attempts to do serious damage were successfully thwarted.

What remains unclear are the motives of Fluffy Bunny (other than pure mischief) for mounting the attacks in the first place.

Fluffy Bunny signed off his defacement by saying: "I'd like to thank Valinux [which runs SourceForge], Apache, Akamai and of course Exodus. Without their poor security and refusal to make security breaches known to the public I wouldn't be sitting atop a mountain of roots and oodles of proprietary software."

This statement together with Fluffy Bunny's logo - Tux the Linux penguin (complete with rabbit ears) masturbating a disproportionately large pink penis - probably mean he is no friend of the open source community... ®

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