When did "found out that an FTP password is 'password'" start to be something that is a 'counterhack'? Except in Hollywood movies?
Replace the headline with 'Guy that seeks naive people for his phishing site is too dumb to use his own software'.
Replace the headline with 'Guy that seeks naive people for his phishing site is too dumb to use his own software'.
- We'll start with a semi-reasonable approximation of the number of forums in which people have discussed the word "hack": usenet threads, mailing lists, social news sites. I like 100,000 for this number. Do you think that's too high? I'm thinking that we have to count everything that's been around since, oh, 1995 or so -- since hackers didn't really seem to care about the definition of the word before then.
- Then we need the mean number of times that this discussion has taken place on those forums. According to my semi-private little search engine for HN, the query `comments with "hack"` returns 45,000+ results, going back to 2008. Amusingly, the oldest result is about exactly this same debate. So let's use 100 for this value, because why not?
- Next we need the mean number of replies generated each time this comes up on one of these forums. Let's say "3". I like "3", because my comment here is the third in the thread started by your comment, and I expect my comment to so dazzle readers with its brilliance that nobody else will bother responding. So, 3.
- Finally, we need some kind of time estimate for time-blown-masturbating-about-"hack"-per-comment-per-forum. I'm skewing the curve a bit here with my comment, but that's because I'm a sucker for meaningless gratification. Anyway, let's say 2 minutes for this, because I haven't used the number "2" yet. (I think Fermi is now spinning at relativistic speeds in his grave.)
So we get: 100,000 * 100 * 3 * 2, for 60,000,000 minutes, or 1 million hours, which would probably be enough to write and polish an entirely new operating system from the ground up.
And that would be a neat hack.
(FWIW: I agree with you, especially when the word "hack" found its way into all kinds of silly little timesaving tricks -- "hack your breakfast routine by using paper bowls!" -- but, at this point, seeing someone mention that they disagree with its usage every single time it's used is even more annoying. That battle was lost. The horse is dead. It's time to stop beating it and move on.)
1) the bad guys found a website who's owner had the password as 'password' and set it up to receive phishing scam data.
2) the good guy found the phishing site and using the same 'password' he changed the phishing HTML, personally called the people who had been scammed so far and then deleted the data.
if you call #1 a hack then #2 has to be a counterhack