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When Manners Run Out – Story of a Website TheftJuly 7th, 2010 by tony |
A guest post from our intern Tony. He has traveled all the way from North-America just to learn the ropes of programming and IT culture from us. He’s last week’s priority 2 task was to handle our site being stolen problem.
A few months ago we discovered that our website (http://www.zeroturnaround.com) had been stolen by jbrute.info (I won’t link it, you need to copy-paste yourself), in every sense of the word. (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, even our logo, HOTLINKED!) A simple side-by-side screenshot will show you the extent of their blatant behavior.
Furious as we were, we managed to keep our manners and reached out (tried to at least) to the author of of jbrute.info and their hosting provider. Sadly, the only response we ever had other than SMTP MAIL CANNOT BE DELIVERED is a canned email instructing us how to write a formal DMCA takedown notice.
We then turned to starting a blog post and asking your help on what you would do in our shoes. As Karl Marx would put it, “the power of the people is strong”, and before long the community came up with a few nothing-less-than-brilliant ideas. (We are not Communists and are not related to the Tsars in anyway, I promise, even though our operational base in Central Estonia might lead you to think otherwise :P)
In particular, Joe Walnes pointed out that since jbrute.info hotlinks .php files and JavaScript from our website, by “check[ing] the HTTP_REFERER, [we] can conditionally change the contents, and with JavaScript [we] can make the page look however [we] want.”
Sadly, life got busy and almost three months suddenly went by, and this little incident was nearly forgotten. Last week, we stumbled upon JBrute once again… Finally we got around to acting on Joe’s advice and, in the most hackish fashion, decided to take it upon ourselves to deliver a truly custom “DMCA Takedown notice” over two glasses of beer. Here is a screenshot of the finished work :) We encourage you to check out jbrute.info (this time I linked :( ) for yourself.
Just to prove our point, we bring you the pseudo xkcd comic.
I hope you enjoyed our little mischief. We’ll keep you posted on the status of jbrute over the coming days following this post and we’ll follow up next week with the technical details – How to un-hack a website! Keep tuned :)
