Justin Watt is the new Clifford Stoll
Friday, August 31st, 2007I hope that reference isn’t too outdated.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 Alexaâs 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? Letâs 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.
