How Marblecake Hacked Time
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Security, Internet on
According to the annual TIME Magazine poll, the most influential person in the world is someone called moot. Who? Well he’s a kid in his twenties who happens to be the founder and leading light of subversive website 4chan, the users of which in turn happen to be behind such successful Internet memes as the infamous Rickrolling phenomenon which saw links all over the web pointing to a 1987 music video of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley.
Surely ‘moot’ cannot really be the most influential person on the planet, beating the likes of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey or even the Korean pop star ‘Rain’ who has apparently pretty much dominated this pointless poll in recent years.
The answer is no, he cannot be, and indeed is not. The clue as to why he won can be revealed if you look at the 21 names which topped the poll, specifically the first letters of their names which spell out the phrase ‘marblecake also the game.’ Marblecake is an IRC channel which was responsible for the much publicised ‘message to scientology’ video meme for example.
A Time spokeswoman confirmed that the hack had taken place, telling The Register that “We took many preventative measures to maintain the integrity of the Time 100 poll on Time.com, and moot has a passionate community of users who worked to influence the poll.”
For what really happened, then, we need to dig deeper into the mechanics of the hack itself and that’s exactly what Paul Lamere managed to do by speaking to the people behind it. He recounts how he had a 4am meeting in an online chatroom with someone only calling himself Zombocom who revealed that members of the 4chan /b/ board decided to try and rig the voting after discovering Time had put moot on the list of 200 nominees following an earlier interview in the magazine. They did this by first creating autovoters to perform the required HTTP get on a voting url which enabled votes to be triggered via spam urls. The way the urls were crafted meant that it was relatively simple to push multiple low value votes, ratings of 1, to any given candidate. When Time eventually spotted voting irregularity, namely that moot had a 300 percent approval ratting while everyone else was below zero, the magazine changed the voting protocol and added an MD5 hash of the url together with a salt, or secret word, to make things secure. Which they would have been were it not for a 4chan /b/ board member discovering that salt sitting within the voting Flash app and extracted it.
When Zombocom found he could pretty much vote as quickly as his computer allowed, which was 500 votes per minute or thereabouts, he set about having some fun on the side and decided to enlist his friends to manipulate the results to spell out the Marblecake message.
Perhaps it is time that Time pulled the plug on this poll once and for all, or at least brought it in house and away from the whims of the online pranksters.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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[…] Davey Winder created an interesting post today on How Marblecake Hacked TimeHere’s a short outlineAccording to the annual TIME Magazine poll, the most influential person in the world is someone called moot . Who? Well he’s a kid in his twenties who happens to be the founder and leading light of subversive website 4chan, the users of which in turn happen to be behind such successful Internet memes as the infamous Rickrolling phenomenon which saw links all over the web pointing to a 1987 music video of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley. Surely ‘moot’ cannot really be the most influ […]
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