Hackers show off skills by hacking into Def Con website

Cult of the Dead Cow unveils Back Orifice 2000.

Hackers at the annual Def Con convention last weekend started as they meant to go on by hacking into the show's home page.

A group calling itself the ADM Crew replaced the Def Con page with one containing hacker in-jokes and references to its members' hacking skills.

The main event at the show was the release of an NT version of the hacking tool Back Orifice, produced by the Cult of the Dead Cow.

According to the Cult, Back Orifice 2000 has several enhancements. It employs stronger encryption, which will make it harder to detect, and is open source, which means network managers can expect many variants.

Back Orifice typically arrives as an e-mail attachment. Once opened, the software installs itself and turns the victim computer into a 'client'. Then, anyone with the other half of the Back Orifice software (the administrator tool) can control the remote PC.

Ironically, the author of the first version of Back Orifice, is working on what could be called a competitive product - a security software package that will protect users from Back Orifice.

While the Cult maintains it produced the software to reveal security flaws and make Microsoft products safer, Microsoft said it is a cover trying to legitimise hacking.