Guide Note

The website portal of Comcast.net was taken over by hackers on Wednesday, May 28, 2008. In an exclusive interview with Wired's Kevin Paulsen, the anonymous teenage hackers "EBK" and "Defiant" explained why they high-jacked the website.

The teens claimed they tried to call the company's technical contact to alert them of the bug in the system, but the technician did not take them seriously and hung up on them. EBK said was when he decided to redirect the site's traffic which caused havoc.

Defiant has been a hacker for about three years. He was kicked out of high school for "possession of narcotics". His MySpace makes it obvious that he still uses marijuana. The teenagers fear they will be arrested.

Fast Facts

1. "Defiant" age 19
2. Defiant's real first name is James
3. "EBK" age 18
4. Are members of hacker group Kryogeniks

• Defiant: "The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it would, I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad."
• EBK: ""If he wasn't such a prick, he could have avoided all of that, I wasn't even really thinking. Plus, I'm just so mad at Comcast. I'm tired of their shitty service." "

Comcast.net, the landing page for the internet service provider, was taken over on May 28, 2008, at 11:00pm EST. Users going to the site found a strange message on an other wise blank page, "KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven and Slacker."

Customers were not able to access their email, or accounts unless they had their mail already re-routed through an email software service like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

The website went back to normal late Thursday afternoon.