Hacker grounded for world's easiest crack

Will Knight ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 30 Sep 1999 16:41 BST

The perpetrator of surely the world's easiest crack received a 12 month probation service and 100 hours' community service Thursday after breaking into the server of a major Singapore news channel's Web site by using the word "news" as both password and username.

In June, the 15-year-old cracker, who cannot be named for legal reasons, chose to launch this ingenious hacking attack after seeing an advert for the Television Corporation of Singapore's (TCS) Internet site on television. He put two and two together and somehow came up with this devilish trick.

He put his extraordinary cleverness to good use, however, replacing all the pages on the new channel's site with a variety of obscene and abusive messages for about 10 hours for no discernible reason.

The judge passing sentence also requested that the boy be home before 6 pm every night for a year, and demanded that he write a formal apology, to be posted on the news channel's Web site.