Portuguese hackers strike back at Moody's downgrade

Portuguese hackers responded to a negative assessment of the country's ability to repay loans by defacing the website of credit reference agency Moody's. The defacement restores the rating of the debt-crippled nation to the highest (A++) mark, while simultaneously attacking Moody's website security and business practices. One …

[Tchou]

Wonderful

hack !

Please Anon use humor and derision like this guy !

[Ken Hagan]

There's hope for us yet.

Clearly this is a pointless piece of vandalism. Equally clearly, it has been designed not to mislead anyone and was performed by someone thinks this is a better use of their technical skills than, say, earning money. I'm proud to be human.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

At least it was quite funny.

[Stratman]

title

And not entirely inaccurate.

One of my brothers used to work in the financial modeling arm of a world-famous organisation, and said pretty much the same thing regarding the motives of the ratings agencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

These hacks are quite impressive...

But I'd rather you hacked into the banks/regulators/cops databases and lured the corrupt bankers who caused the the crash in the first place.

And if you could also empty their Swiss bank accounts as well the that would be good.

[darkdog]

you've been had..

that wasn't a defacement -- that was only viewable on a specially crafted URL because the "defacement" was actually HTML on one of the GET variables that the page happened to render.

it's not even working anymore now, because they seem to have started doing some parsing of the said variable.

[nyelvmark]

So,

... it only worked if you clicked on a link that someone sent you. It would be interesting to see that url. It sounds like an injection attack that could have nastier applications, such as phishing.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Marcia

Marcia. thx for that screendump but, OMG, PINK task bar - EEEWWW!

[Elmer Phud]

Not just the pink

Not running Ad Block, either.

[Marcia David]

Pink is the new black

It's to match the laptop itself, which is also pink... it's like that rule that the shoes and the handbag and the belt should match ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

(less forcefully)?

Like the ECB accepting portuguese bounds despite the downgrade? Yeah, much less...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction

Bond and not bound

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Bond and not bound

You have the kind of banking fun *YOU* want. I'll have the kind of manking fun *I* want.

[Anonymous Coward]

website on FF

your reporting reader has this on his bookmarks toolbar

6th link

http://www.darkwaver.com/eklectique/dye.html

WTF ????

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedant Mode

Moody's don't have a A++ rating. It should be Aaa.

I'll get my sense-of-humour-failure geeky coat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also got a snap of it...

It was quite a funny hack/exploit/defacement I must say, those pesky US based ratings agencies will do anything to keep the green buck floating.

BTW, If you look at the USD/EUR exchange chats for the last mounts/year you will note this strange correlation between spikes of the EUR value and some "record" negative rating on some EUR country debt.

And how do they rate the US debt? AAA, can you believe that?

Beer? just because its Friday!

[nigel 15]

Barbie's screen cap?

Was the screen cap of the defacement from barbie's very own laptop?

[Marcia David]

Can't a woman like pink?

No, it was made by a software developer that happens to be a woman and that like pink... want a photo of the laptop as well? It matches!

[disfit]

Re: Can't a woman like pink?

Of course she can .. or in this case you can and apparently do ;-)

But a Sony Vaio ... pink or otherwise? Now that just isn't right! ;-)~

[Filippo]

they have a point

These rating agencies are far too powerful and unaccountable. What if a foreign power bribed or blackmailed S&P to declass your country?

[Anonymous Coward]

foreign power? or just two-bit CDS holders

CDS holders nominally profit bigtime if any bond issuer the CDS is insurance for, defaults. So lots of financial orgs, e.g. hedge funds, have incentives to encourage sovereign default. Brilliant program on this on bbc radio 4 last tue, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b0128q7z

incidentally the ratings agencies have bigtime bad karma for rating junk products aaa before lehmans.

[John Dougald McCallum]

Junk Bonds and the almighty Dollar

What will these rating agencies do when the US start to default on their debts when the so called debt ceiling is reached very soon will it be junk status or will it not .If not they will have to explain why.

[J 3]

We sell some hunches and everyone believes them

Can't really argue with that, methinks...

[Anonymous Coward]

OT: el gordo

Any one see the Keiser Report recently?

There were interesting observations that Spain could probably bring in about $20 million to $80 billion merely by putting el gordo on NASDAQ

But IMF and ECB (reportedly) might not be interested in that as its -ahem- -cough, cough- colleagues in finance might prefer to sell the multibillion profit making concern to an -ahem- -cough, cough- interested party and so resist any attempts to put el gordo on NASDAQ.

Preferring instead, to sell el gordo for a billion or so and besides the blood-lust frenzy in finance market means that Euro citizens must have a tough time ahead.