On Getting Farked?

(Photo: Valleywag/revised)

Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, is accusing Fox13's Darrell Phillips of hacking into the popular social networking news site, according to Valleywag, a tech gossip rag based in Silicon Valley.

(Valleywag is like Mediaverse, except Valleywag is corporate-owned by New York-based Gawker Media -- and when Mediaverse has exclusives, there's an apparent effort made to contact the parties involved.)

An excerpt from Valleywag:

Curtis believes that Phillips, or someone working with Phillips, sent him and several other Fark employees deceptive emails in an attempt to get them to download a trojan, a form of computer virus. The Trojan was designed to capture
their passwords and give the author access to Fark's servers. In one case, it succeeded, giving a hacker passwords to a file server and one Fark employee's email account; he tried, but failed, to break into Fark's Web servers and email. Unfortunately for the hacker, Fark was able to trace his attempts to break into their system back to a machine in Memphis connected to a Comcast high-speed Internet connection.

At the same time, Phillips, already a Fark member, logged into several other user accounts on Fark -- either ones he'd created or ones to which he'd somehow gotten access. Phillips also purchased, using PayPal, a paid subscription to TotalFark, a premium Fark service. The accounts all used the same IP addresses as the hacker. Busted. Curtis says he's "99 percent sure" it's Phillips -- and is now attempting to pursue legal action, seeking detailed data from Comcast, to remove his doubts.

What does this mean? Curtis is unsure of Phllips's potential motives -- assuming Phillips is, indeed, the hacker. Phillips may have had accomplices, after all -- or his own accounts may have been compromised, which would be embarrassing enough for the reporter, who's apparently somewhat Internet-savvy.

But consider this: Phillips's station has launched a news aggregator, OnMemphis.com. The hacker appears to have been hunting for source code and trying to log into Fark's Web-based moderation tools. A look at either would be helpful to someone designing a social-news website.

From this point, Valleywag spins off to wonder whether Phillips is part of a Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. conspiracy. Apparently, News Corp., which owns Fox13, once made a play to acquire Fark.

So, is Phillips a red-handed hacker? Who knows. He's not quoted in Valleywag's exclusive. Phillips has not yet responded to Mediaverse inquiries. Fox13 is expected to make a statement.

Could this be a Fark, a hoax, a really bad joke? No, "the story's quite serious," Owen Thomas, Valleywag's managing editor, wrote in an E-mail.

(As an aside, Thomas clarified the relationship between himself and Curtis. "There's no relationship, aside from the fact that I know Drew Curtis from a previous job as an editor at Business 2.0, which featured Fark in a cover story. Curtis chose to make his public statement exclusively to me," Owens wrote in an E-mail.)

The public statement is making the rounds on the Internet. As of 3:30 p.m. Friday, Valleywag's article has been viewed nearly 21,000 times. These days, that makes it news and worthy of discussion here.

Phillips is well-respected in Memphis. Under his guide, Fox13's online news operation has flourished.

If Curtis's allegation is true, then it really poses ethical and legal problems for Phillips and Fox13.

... Not sure if this is related, but it's interesting: OnMemphis.com has removed the chat widget that allowed users to speak directly with the Web staff.
... A Fark forum:

Tanqueray: Hacker?????This guy looks like he loses at tic-tac-toe.

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ON AN UNRELATED, BUT RELATED, NOTE: MyFox sites. (More.) Bad for Memphis?