Want to know what people email to Saddam Hussein?

Hacking insight

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 30th October 2002 10:08 GMT

Increase your knowledge of the latest threats to your busines

An insight in what people want to tell Saddam Hussein comes from the pitifully poor security setup on the Iraqi President's main Web page.

The contact email address on the Iraqi President's site, run by Uruklink.net (Iraq's state-controlled ISP), is press@uruklink.net.

It seems most unlikely that the Iraqi President himself uses this account, but the people emailing this address can reasonably be supposed to want to contact the Iraqi dictator, and that's where our interest lies.

Wired reports how it possible (at least earlier this month) to browse emails sent to this address. By clicking on "Check your e-mail in Uruk" on the homepage of Uruklink.net and then guessing the login name and password for press@uruklink.net - which turned out to be the same five-letter word.

Messages sent to the address, Wired reports, range from death threats and business offers to fawning praise. Many of these messages were marked unread and it seems the mailbox (Iraq's equivalent of president@whitehouse.gov) has exceeded its allocation, with messages now bouncing back to their senders.

But let's get back to talking about the contents of these emails.

Most worrying are various offers to help Iraq secure weapons of mass destruction, especially at a time when the US tries to rally world opinion in its quest to overthrow the Iraqi dictator on the basis of his alleged support for global terrorism.

Whether such messages were sent, and the means to uncover them discovered, as part of some black propaganda effort we'll leave it for you to decide. They certainly make interesting reading.

Wired carries extensive extracts from these various missives here. ®