Borland exposé ‘irresponsible’

Borland Interbase backdoor exposed

Irresponsible, us? Absolutely, according to a letter Drew Cullen recently received from Ian Whitcombe:

I have been an avid reader of your site for a while now and have always found it informative and professional. However, I was extremely shocked when reading your article on the Borland Interbase backdoor to see how irresponsible you have been by publishing, not only the back door itself, but also the port to scan on the Internet to take advantage of it. Whereas I accept that users of Interbase should be aware of this problem, could you not have written this article with slightly less technical detail? Clearly, this information could be gleaned from hacker sites or whatever, but do you have to make it so easy?

Add this to the sensationalist and wholly irresponsible How to Hack Microsoft article recently and it appears that you are keen to stir up as much activity of this sort as possible. Is this deliberate so that you have more juicy hacking stories to report?

So come on Mr Cullen, can we have the same stories with a little less damaging detail?

Ian, I'd like to make the following points:

The Borland piece comes from SecurityFocus.com, a US site with which we have a content-swapping agreement. SecurityFocus is an anti-hacking/pro-security site, which publishes lists of bugs (such as NTBugTraq).

By all means consider How to hack Microsoft sensationalist.. the purpose of this article was to show our general readership how easily hackers can, through social engineering and other relatively simple means, get past the systems of large/sophisticated guides. It certainly wasn't a hacker's manual - although there are plenty of those around on the Net.

Finally, your suggestion that we are engineering hacker activity to write stories is taking a conspiracy theory a little too far, don't you think?

Drew