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O'Reilly stirs a response

Someone with a little more liability on his hands is Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, whose Web site was hacked over the weekend and subscriber information posted to Wikileaks. O'Reilly had been railing against Wikileaks and 4chan over the Palin hack all week on his show, The O'Reilly Factor.

"I'm not going to mention the Web site that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites. Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him?," said O'Reilly on his show last week.

4chan, which revels in bad behavior, took this to heart, putting the words "DESPICABLE, SLIMY, SCUMY" at the top of the random talk channel, known as /b/, where Rubico first posted his work. To them it was a joke.

Someone else took it as a challenge and O'Reilly's personal site was compromised over the weekend. The list posted to Wikileaks contains at least 205 names, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and passwords of subscribers to O'Reilly, which were not protected or encrypted.

O'Reilly's personal page is not hosted by Fox's parent company News Corp., it's hosted by a Los Angeles company called Nox Solutions. Its list of customers is a who's who of the political right, including Lara Ingraham, Bill Bennett and talk show hosts Mike Gallagher, Jerry Doyle and Michael Medved. It also hosts the sites of Larry King and Dr. Drew Pinsky, who are decidedly not right-wing. Queries to Nox by InternetNews.com were not returned, nor was a query to Fox News.

"The hack was a response to the pundit's recent scurrilous attacks over the Sarah Palin's e-mail story--including on Wikileaks and other members of the press," said Wikileaks in a statement on their Web site. Wikileaks said the security on O'Reilly's website was "non-existent."

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Abrams couldn't believe that O'Reilly, who can be so sanctimonious in attacking the Internet community, would not have a hardened wall around his Web site, especially with subscriber info.

"You would expect to get hacked, and ask what to do about it. Not when it happens, but before it happens. You should take the most basic precautions to protect user data." He said Wikileaks' claim that security was non-existent "is not hard to believe when they are keeping passwords in plain text."

Alperovitch said he wasn't surprised at the retaliation hack either. "When you look at any of these high profile sites, they are often hosted on third party locations and don't have much security on them, and you don't ask a lot of questions until after this sort of thing happens," he said.

In this case, O'Reilly may be on the hook in a much bigger way than Yahoo, as these customers were paying $49.95 for a year of access to a site that had no protection for their information. "The people who have their information compromised may go after him. His name was on that site, obviously he wasn't administering it but he will take responsibility," said Alperovitch.

Nox is based in Los Angeles, and California has some of the strictest disclosure laws regarding breaches. As of Monday evening, there was no notice on the site of the hack.

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