The digital underground is full of fragile alliances, backstabbing, and full-blown rivalries. On Sunday, Peace, a hacker linked to the Myspace and other large scale data breaches, compromised the site of another hacker, allegedly in response to scamming.
The victim is w0rm, a hacker who has previously targeted news organisations, and who sells stolen data on his own black market site. The episode highlights the lengths cybercriminals are willing to go to police their own trade of stolen data, and punish supposed scammers.
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“He decided to fuck with me so I [ended] up getting root on his box,” Peace told Motherboard in an online chat.
The homepage of w0rm’s site usually includes quotes ripped from media reports, describing the hacker’s various escapades. At the time of writing, however, the site has been defaced, and includes a link to apparent internal files of the site. Peace told Motherboard that the data contains messages from w0rm’s site, as well as emails and jabber contacts.
Peace made his name this summer after publicly selling a number of high-profile data breaches, including Myspace, LinkedIn, and VK.com. Peace also listed 200 million supposed credentials from Yahoo in August. This spurred on a company investigation, in which Yahoo then uncovered the recently announced breach of at least half a billion customer records.
W0rm has previously hacked the Wall Street Journal, VICE, and CNET. w0rm’s eponymous forum is where he and others advertise hacked data, including information stolen from other hacking forums.
Peace wouldn’t go into the specifics of why he had targeted w0rm. When asked if it was because w0rm had scammed him over a database sale, Peace said, “sort of yes.” At the top of the defaced webpage, it reads “~Hacked by Peace of Mind for fucking with Hell Forum.” (Hell is a dark web hacking forum with a dramatic history, facing turbulent downtime, and allegedly switching owners).
W0rm did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.