[PHC] BREAKING NEWS [PHC]

Ryan Russell, aka Blue Boar, was fired today from his position at SecurityFocus
(the first sellout company to sellout).  Many have speculated as to what the
reason(s) for his firing might be, so now the Phrack High Council brings you
the full story.

When Symantec purchased SecurityFocus, they saw it as an investment.  The
reputation of SecurityFocus seemed to be a valuable asset in their minds; they
saw it as the pinnacle of the whitehat world [editors note: pinnacle of the
whitehat world roughly translates to entrace to the hacking world].  Having
someone like Ryan Russell aboard seemed to be detrimental to the image they
were trying to project to the public.

"Look, we may not actually know anything about security, but we'd at least
like our customers to think we do," said SecurityFocus Co-founder Elias Levy
in a telephone interview.  "When we were just SecurityFocus, it was OK to have
someone like Ryan along, just so we could have someone to laugh at, and to
throw our empty beercans at, but now that we've sold out even further, we have
to purge our trash."

Al Huger could be found on IRC today saying:

<ah:#antisnort> ok, since everyone is messaging me about Ryan - he was
     fired, with cause.  I did not do the firing althought I support the
     decision 100%.

Apparently, no one really likes this guy.

"I can't deny that I'm upset over this," Russell said during a phone
conversation to a PHC member, "and I'm even a little bit bitter.  Yes, I was
ssh'ing into sensitive *.securityfocus.com machines from my shell account on
my webhosting provider.  How was I supposed to know that the ssh client was
backdoored, and hackers logged my password and were able to infiltrate the
entire Securityfocus subnet?  Take a look at my website and you'll see that
I'm a hacker.  I don't have time for this petty stuff."

Although yet unconfirmed, PHC suspects Russell of being a "crack fiend".

Earlier this month, it was made public that the webhost for Ryan's website had
been comprimised, when someone anonymously contributed a tarball of his home
directory for the Official Phrack Website.  Shocking, scandelous secrets were
then revealed.  One only had to take a quick glimpse of his .bash_history to
see his unethical attempt to obtain passwords from porn sites hosted on the
same machine, and his stumbling around the bash shell, not understanding the
simplest interface to a Unix enviornment.

"Yes, it was my first experience with Unix.  What do you expect?  I do have
a Firewall-1 certifcation, you know!" said Russell.

In other news, Security's Largest Man, Ofir Afkin, was recently fired from
his $150,000 USD position with Atstake.  Professor Mudge said, "We realized
that having someone on staff, simply because they annually release 200 page
pdf's on ICMP scanning, is not in the best interest of the company.  Rather,
it seems that Ofir needs to find a job somewhere better suited for his skills.
Perhaps rewriting the ICMP rfc's, or something to that nature.  However, we've
recently come to the conclusion that his scanning techniques have very little
use in the security world.  He wasn't able to be innovative, he wasn't able
to do anything new.  Frankly, we're bored by his research, and futher we're
embarassed that we have to hire others to write his scanner for him.  If he
learns C, maybe we'll consider rehiring him in the future, but that isn't that
likely. And frankly, we are all growing a bit tired looking at this morbidly
obese fatman."

Mudge is currently on unpaid leave from his position at Atstake pending the
completion of the detoxication and heroin rehabilitation programs.

            (c)opyright 2002 [PHC]