It's been two years since Aaron Swartz 's death . To commemorate the anniversary of his suicide, a hacker with the nickname "Ulzr1z" hacked and defaced the websites of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The attackers or the attacker managed to deface 15 different websites of the institution, adding the following text, which has already been removed:
./ Hacked by Ulzr1z
Follow me @ulzr1z
Hacked!
The attackers managed to gain access to the WordPress admin panel, which controlled all of the institution's websites. They tweeted a screenshot to prove their access.
0x50776e6564 @ulzr1z
Panel Admin Massachusetts Institute of Technology, #MIT #Hacked Access to all other subdomain
The 15 defaced subdomains, including websites for courses on topics such as Social Physics, were all posted on Pastebin.
This is not the first time that MIT has been targeted in protest of the death of activist Aaron.
Two years ago, in 2013, the Anonymous attackers completely took down the website to avenge Aaron's death.
Who was activist Aaron?
At the age of 14, he became one of the authors of the RSS (RDF Site Summary) standard, a way to transmit information from a website, usually news or announcements of new blog posts, in a quick and easy way to other pages or applications (syndication).
He later actively participated in the Creative Commons founded by Professor Larry Lessig and in the Reddit, of which he was also a co-founder.
Aaron studied at Stanford for a year but dropped out and then devoted himself to programming and political cyberactivism .
In 2009, he managed to download and then freely make available online about 20% of the documents from federal courts that were registered in the PACER database. Although they should be formally free, PACER charged for access, but Aaron managed to make them available to the general public.
A little later, in 2011, by almost secretly connecting a laptop to the MIT network, he downloaded four million publications from the JSTOR database, which makes available the content of hundreds of scientific journals by subscription, many of which should also be freely available as public domain.
The publications were released by him in the form of a torrent file on the Internet, angering MIT and JSTOR. Aaron was arrested but released on bail, but was charged with fraud.
Both cases put Aaron in the sights of American authorities who launched investigations against him.
Aaron had significant political activity in favor of digital rights and against government intervention, while he had written and made available under free licenses several programs.
Source: secnews.gr
