Hacking Time's 2009 World's Most Influential Persons

The big ones are not that invincible after all. Time Magazine is big but after their 2009 World's Most Influential Persons poll, they come out as nothing but like everyone else--hackable. This is how they tell the world about their "most influential person in the world" for 2009:

In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.

When I heard about it, I was confused, I thought it would be someone as big as the likes of Obama or Oprah but it was someone known as Moot. Christopher Poole (a.k.a Moot) is the founder of the online community 4chan.org. To tell you honestly, I really do not know anything about 4chan.org or its founder that is why I was surprised about the result of Time's poll. So I did a little research and found out the funny side of the supposed to be serious Most Influential Person poll. I learned how Time's poll was precision hacked. The hackers were so good that they were able to embed a message in the manipulated poll results. The message is shown in the image above, it spells "MARBLE CAKE ALSO THE GAME". What does it mean? Zombocom, one of the hackers says: ” Marblecake was an irc channel where the “Message to Scientology” video originated. Many believe we are “dead” or only doing hugraids etc, so I thought it would also be a way of saying : we’re still around and we don’t just do only “moralfag” stuff ."

What is funny about the Time poll is that something as big as Time failed to use the very basic of security measures like authentication or validation. When Time realised that their poll was being hacked, they threw in some security measures but by then it was too late.

Read more about how Time's poll was hacked at MusicMachinery.com.

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