When “Hackers” Was Hacked

When people think about early movie websites, they might first think of Space Jam, since its website from 1996 famously stayed untouched for decades. But Space Jam wasn’t the first movie to get a website. That credit actually goes to either Stargate or Star Trek: Generations, which both launched websites in October, 1994.

That was when movie studios began experimenting with how to take advantage of the web, already clearly the next big thing, for movie promotion. MGM/UA hired a company called Digital Planet to develop websites for several of their upcoming films, including one for the movie Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie and some other people.

It was the summer of 1995, and The Net had just come out in theaters when the Hackers website launched with a simple black page, white text and some light graphics. The site had pages about the cast, crew, production, and links to download movie clips. It was typical movie promo stuff. And it had an animated gif for the title. Fancy.

But around August 8, not long after launch, the website was defaced. Now people visiting the site were greeted with this:

The picture was scribbled on, and text on the website had been changed. Near the top it now said, “This is going to be a lame, cheesy, promotional site for a movie.” The film description was updated to say:

Hackers, the new action adventure movie from those idiots in Hollywood, takes you inside a world where there's no plot or creative thought, there's only boring rehashed ideas...

What Kool-Aid was to Jonestown... Hackers is to every Cyberpunk movie ever made.

The link to download a clip of the movie was now labeled, “Click Here for a Big Waste of Bandwidth.”

And perhaps most hilariously, the footer of the website told people to “go see The Net instead of this dog.”

The site claimed that it was “Hacked by ILF.”

So who was ILF?

The Internet Liberation Front was a hacking group that made news in 1994 when they “mail-bombed” a couple of journalists. They didn’t actually send a bomb in the mail, they just flooded their email inboxes with copies of their manifesto until their email was unusable. Time magazine reported:

Not only had someone jammed [Josh Quittner’s] Internet mailbox with thousands of unwanted pieces of E-mail, finally shutting down his Internet access altogether, but the couple’s telephone had been reprogrammed to forward incoming calls to an out-of-state number, where friends and relatives heard a recorded greeting laced with obscenities.

The ILF’s manifesto that filled his inbox said in part:

Once upon a time, there was a wide area network called the Internet.

A network unscathed by capitalistic Fortune 500 companies and the like.

Then someone decided to de-regulate the Internet and hand it over to the "big boys" in the telecommunications industry. "Big boys" like SprintNet, MCI, AT&T, and the like. Now we all know how this story ends - Capitalist Pig Corporation takes control of a good thing, and in the ever-so-important-money-making-general-scheme-of-things, the good thing turns into another overflowing cesspool of greed.

It’s like they were describing enshittification. They saw it coming. The manifesto continued:

The ILF has now declared war on any company suspected of contributing to the final demise of the Internet. If you fit into any of the above mentioned categories of disgust, FEAR US... we have already stolen your proprietary source code. We have already pillaged your million dollar research data. And if you would like to avoid financial ruin, then heed our warning and get the fuck out of dodge.

MGM/UA’s Response

Oh no, the website for their movie about hackers was hacked! So what else could they do but leave it that way and milk the situation for the publicity? Here’s how it was reported in the Los Angeles Daily News in a piece that was picked up and published in other papers:

MGM, sensing an opportunity to turn hackery into flackery, decided to maintain the site in its altered form. A prepared statement was released: “We don’t approve of their thrashing our web site, but are thoroughly impressed by their creativity.”

By now you’re thinking, surely this was all just a publicity stunt, right?

Well, when MGM/UA finally restored the website, they added this message:

Here are those letters, typos and all. First, “Hacker Announcing Hacked Site”:

Hah. You fools installed Gatekeeper, thinking it would protect you from the more evil denizens of cyberspace. But no. We, The Praetorians, have been forced to prove our worth to the lesser mortals at MGM.

They ignored our screenplay for the movie 'Praetorians', choosing instead to call it 'Hackers' and base it upon some adolescent compusive masturbators who hold not one-tenth of our supreme skills in their puny hands. Regrettably I was forced to fake my death at the hands of Sandra Bullock, but now I have wreaked revenge upon those who doubted my technique (which, incidentally, is very good) as an independant contractor for the dental insurance schemes, they supply me with the neccessary ub3rt00lz to bust root on your boxes. GreatCircle, I urinate upon your firewall. Sidewinder, I defecate in your general direction.

Oh, to the point. To prove to the movie-going chimps that my technique is supremely advanced, I have taken cybercontrol of MGM's so called 'home-page' for the 'movie' (and I use the term loosely) HACKERS, a cinematic abortion riding the wave of cyberriffic techno-thriller uber-gen-x flicks.

http://www.mgm.com/hackers/index.html

Point your puny webtools in this direction for confirmation of my k-rad ubertechnique(tm). Beware, this is only the beginning...

Hmm. That seems like a suspiciously different tone than the writing in the ILF manifesto. (Also, wow, I haven’t seen “k-rad” in a long time. That takes me back.)

Here is “Apology Letter”:

Dear Sirs:

I would like to offer an apology for my actions of last night. There was no malice intended, I just got carried away. I understand you may not appreciate the humor of my message; I agree, it was in poor taste and went entirely too far.

I'd like to stress that none of the sites or groups listed in my remake of the page had anything to do with the hack, either by technical assistance or moral support. I simply chose them because they are names people would recognize. I can't offer any proof of this, but ask that you accept it anyway, because it is true.

As a way of making up for some of the damage we have done, I'd like to offer some ways to secure your machines against any further intrusions

[security details deleted]

Again, I would like to offer my deepest apologies, and my hope that the damage I have done (even though it was unintentional) can be fixed with as little cost and inconvenience as possible.

This is a very formal sounding letter, not exactly what you expect from a hacker; I meant it to be so. I regret what I did, and hope to repair some of the damage done not only to you but to my fellow hackers, who are explorers and not vandals. I know this incident reflects badly upon tham, and I ask that you use what influence you have to convince others that what happened was the work of a thoughtless individual, not an entire community. Please don't let them be punished for what I did.

I realize you may view this anonymous note with some skepticism, and may not believe it is even from the person who hacked you. I didn't keep any logs of my activity so I can't show them to you. But I can tell you where the files were; which is something only someone who has been inside your machine should know. [security details deleted]

I hope this letter speaks for itself, because I won't be contacting you again. I'd rather not go to prison for what was at heart a prank. I hope you agree that would serve no good purpose. I'm not an ad man, but it's just possible you can use what I did to promote your movie. It would certainly be better publicity than being behind the prosecution of a hacker, or the persecution of his community.

I am truly sorry.

Anonymous

So it wasn’t the ILF after all. But was the site still really hacked, or was it all a publicity stunt?

The movie’s director, Ian Softley, told Slashfilm in 2015 that he saw the hacking as a “fringe activity” compared to the “affectionate response” they generally received from the hacking community. So at least he seemed to think it was real.

I reached out to Paul Grand, then CEO of Digital Planet, to see if he had anything to confirm or deny after 30 years. At the time of publishing, I haven’t heard back from him.

The first website to be hacked

Assuming that the hack was legit, it appears that the Hackers hack was actually the first ever website hack, or at least the first one to be documented. Perhaps some other site had been quietly hacked into without being altered or acknowledged, but this is the earliest defacing of a website I could find with a verifiable date.

The LA Times reported on the hack on August 12, 1995, saying that the hack occurred “last weekend,” placing it on August 8 or 9.

The only other defacing of a website I could find that year was a Canadian ISP whose website was altered to say “You’ve been hacked MOFO” but I could not find an actual date when that happened or any contemporaneous report. So I suppose it’s possible that happened first, but in the absence of documentation, Hackers looks like the earliest recorded website hack.

To the best of my knowledge, the anonymous hacker still has not been identified. If anyone would like to come forward and confess, here’s where to reach me.

This was originally about Tank Girl

I actually started out this newsletter writing about the Tank Girl website, also by Digital Planet, and the absolutely bonkers invitation it had for people to email their sex fantasies to Tank Girl:

Don't forget to tell me all the nasty things you'd like to do to me, too. You can bet I'll love it!!!

I shudder to think of what people may have written. Or what they would write if something like that appeared on a major studio website today.

I was also going to write about a contest on the site where the winner would get drawn in a Tank Girl comic, and how I found a major mistake in the rules, and I emailed them about it, and they were so thankful that they shipped me a giant twenty-foot-long vinyl Tank Girl banner as a thank-you gift, and I thought it was cool but also what the hell was I going to do with a twenty-foot vinyl Tank Girl banner?! Hang it in my multiplex?

But as I was doing research for that story, I went down a Digital Planet rabbit hole and realized that the Hackers story, which was originally going to be this newsletter’s B story, was actually much more interesting than my giant vinyl banner.

And that’s it for another newsletter. Tank you for reading. Get it? That would have been hilarious if this newsletter was actually about the Tank Girl story as originally planned. Or... no, I guess it wouldn’t have been.

Anyway, see you next time. Until then: Hack the planet!

David