RIAA website gets trashed

THE THUGS IN SUITS at the RIAA might be good at suing single mothers, extracting college savings from teenagers, and bribing US congress-critters to threaten universities with loss of federal funds over students' file sharing, but it seems they're not very good at running a website to catapult their own propaganda.

Over the weekend, web denizens on the social news site Reddit got interested in a slow SQL query targeting the RIAA's website. Then, according to TorrentFreak, "someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site's entire database."

One of the posters at Reddit found evidence that the RIAA's website seems to use the Exponent Content Management System (CMS), older versions of which apparently "have a lot of vulnerabilities... including SQL injection."

In addition to completely trashing the RIAA's website, some playful geeks made it link to the file sharing anarchists' site Pirate Bay and other diverse amusements.

The RIAA managed to restore the website at least once, but it might be going down a lot because they haven't fixed the SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, according to TorrentFreak. µ

L'INQ
TorrentFreak