Justin Watt is the new Clifford Stoll

I hope that reference isn’t too outdated. I essentially learned Unix from Clifford Stoll’s account of tracking down the hacker who hacked into his systems, The Cuckoo’s Egg.

Now my friend Justin Watt is on a mission, first tracking down the guy who hacked his blog and then outing a shady search engine marketer.

And who is this Brant Walker? Apparently a recent graduate of Platt College in San Diego. A quick scan of his web portfolio turns up a parody site called Nicotine Island. Hmm, where have I seen Nicotine Island before? Oh yeah, a post by one beverlybimbo in a Yahoo Groups for Smoking and Tobacco Hobbies.

I think I can reconstruct what happened here. Brant Walker, using the fake identity Julie Winfield, is trying to drive traffic to his Rotten Neighbors site. He checks out the Alexa Movers & Shakers list and discovers my site listed number 4 because I got dugg last week.

He follows Alexa’s link to my homepage and clicks to my about page, grabs my email address, and sends me the email at the top. How am I doing so far? Let’s take a look back at my referrer log entries from just before 4:30pm yesterday (when I got the email), the ones that I previously thought held no clues.

I love reading this sort of stuff.

Tags:

3 Responses to “Justin Watt is the new Clifford Stoll”

  1. Justin Watt Says:

    Now if only people would stop messing with me, I’d have a chance to actually read the Cucko’s Egg. :)

  2. Brant Walker Says:

    Justin, I am sorry for what I did. I wish I could take it back. There should be more neighbors like you out there. I wish you the best.

  3. marcia Says:

    I need to start airing my grievances online so the parties responsible can apologize to me on my friends’ blogs.

Leave a Reply