[MacPerl] Chris Nandor - Hacking the All-Star game?

[Troy_Davis <Troy_Davis@slipstream.com>]

Wow, Chris. I didn't know you had such a deviant streak. I'm liking you 
more and more every day!

;-)

Sorry if this message is a duplicate. Surely someone else on the list has 
seen this by now...

Best,
Troy


From: 
http://www.excite.com/computers_and_internet/tech_news/zdnet/?article=/news
/19990709/2290058.inp

Hacker fouls off All-Star site

By Margaret Kane 07/08/99 02:09:00 PM

A Red Sox fan cast more than 25,000 votes at baseball's All-Star site to 
push Boston shortstop ahead of Yankee rival.

One of the biggest rivalries in baseball just got digital.

A 25-year-old Boston Red Sox fan cast around 25,000 votes for shortstop 
Nomar Garciaparra on Major League Baseball's All-Star game voting site.

The site allowed users to log on to vote for players. Starters for the 
game are chosen by the fans, with ballots distributed at games and 
through promotions. The League also allowed fans to go online and vote, 
but was supposed to restrict the number of times they could cast a ballot 
to 22, equal to the number of times ballots were distributed at each 
Major League ballpark.

But when Sox fan Chris Nandor heard that Garciaparra was trailing New 
York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter by around 20,000 votes, he decided to 
bump that limit up a bit, the Boston Globe reported.

He cast 25,259 votes for Garciaparra and other Red Sox players on the 
last day of online voting, said officials for SportsLine USA Inc. 
(Nasdaq:SPLN), which developed the League's All-Star site. The hacker 
used a Perl script to repeatedly submit the entries to the Web site.

SportsLine said that their system administrators detected the hack and 
were able to cancel the votes.

One of many "There were other programs and spoofs," said Dan 
Leichtenschlag, senior vice president of operations for Sportsline.

"For the most part people were informed when they exceeded the 22 vote 
limit, but once we realized people were trying to game us, we would 
return the votes and let them think they tricked us," he said.

The Garciaparra hack was fairly easy to detect. The hacker never changed 
the phone number or e-mail address that he used to cast votes from, 
Leichtenschlag said.




_____________________________
Troy Davis
Interactive Director
Mann Bukvic Gatch Partners
205 W. 4th Street
Suite #1130
Cincinnati, Ohio  45202  USA   
http://www.slipstream.com
Tel: (513) 241-4444
Fax: (513) 241-1107


===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org