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OK, OK... so there's been a lot of chatter all over the net about this malcor thing.

So, here we go... it was us. No big surprise at this point, right? Basically, it was a lead in to the first mission of MacHeist 2 that got waaay out of hand. So we're apologizing for it and for the trouble it's caused.

We've shut down the malcor blog and all associated sites and malcor chewed on his cyanide tablet so it's all history now.

It's too bad that it spiralled so far out of control because it would've been a great way to lead off this year's festivities, which are about to start very soon. As you know, we always try our hardest to come up with cool missions and we thought it'd be great to have mission 1 have a rogue hacker that was running rampant that you heisters would put a stop to. But then things got a bit crazy and beyond our control, unfortunately.

We really hope that the people behind the "hacked" sites, their hosting compaines, and the companies that create their content management systems aren't looked upon negatively by you all. The intent of everyone wasn't malicious but just to have some fun.

So anyway, I hope we can put everything behind us now and move on to another great season of missions for MacHeist II, which will be here very soon after a few tweaks on our end.

Thanks, everyone.

edit: links to posts from the "hacked" sites...
Glenn Wolsey: What Really Happened, Sincere Apologies
MacApper: Woops I did it Again
Apple Matters: Sincere Apologies

John Casasanta
MacHeist Director
tap tap tap chief

Thanks for doing that. This helps a lot.

Oh, and can I say, I told ya so.... (about it being Macheist)

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

Oh, and if you want, you can digg it up as well: http://digg.com/apple/Macheist_admits_t … r_PR_stunt

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

Phew finally!  Thanks John.  It was getting hot in here

I posted my take on this on MacApper if anyone still cares...

Miles Evans

Um...they all lost any respect - to MacApper and Glenn there was very little of in the first place - because of this.  It's not the fact that they partook as it would've been fine, but when people like some of us here figured it out and realized that it was a total scam and nothing but some promotion either for their own sites or MH, they tried to cover it up.  We called you all out on it and you didn't have the guts to admit that you got caught.  We knew it.  It was all bullshit and a large majority of us could smell it from the start, just none of the sites owned up and rather tried to hide the truth.  I know it was supposed to lead up in a decent manner, and it wasn't MH that ruined it, it was the sites acting in an asinine manner that made it what it was.

To MacApper, Glenn, and AppleMatters: may the scene scorn you.  You disgust me with the way you managed this situation.  It was despicable.  We caught on, you acted like ignorant fools in a manner that just proved it was true.  You're a sad part of the Apple cult.

And who was one of the first to call bullshit?

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I figured.  Malcor sounded like something out of MacHeist, I might have heard it before here, I'm not sure.

I agree with Warbrain.  The websites involved blew it way out of proportion by not saying anything, and when digg got involved... well, you know.

GlennWosley.com has the respect of me - he's someone I have in Mail's RSS, and when that threw up the nice old "!", it surprised me.  It sure would have been nice if someone had "come out of the closet" about this earlier.

It would have been and excellent idea, too bad it got too big.  Can't wait to get started on MH2 though!!

(  Chad Ohman  )

Like WordPress? You'll like this better.

oh for the love of god.  I don't get it.  Why do you all care? this is absurd.  So they put up a pr stunt.  Oh, so they didn't own up to it?  who the f cares.  It was part of the fun.  It's not their place to admit it, when they're doing this for macheist.  They got something out of this, not sure if it's money, advertising, or what, but these sites did, to get that stuff they enter into an agreement with Macheist that they keep it quiet.  These sites were down for a day...so what?  how does that effect any of you?  why is that deserving of scorn? did these sites have a special "donate your hard earned money to help us find malcor" button i missed? no.  get over it, besides, you're all just bitching for no reason, i know a lot of us had fun picking out the pieces to solve the puzzle, and whether it was a real person or not, you still pick through the pieces to find out who it is. so...we found out it was macheist. cool.  i welcome stuff like that and especially macheist2

My twitter

No real surprise here.  I believe I was the first to actually say it was gonna be the lead in to MacHeist II after WarBrain speculated it was a PR stunt.  Interesting study in how marketing can backfire, however.

Yeah, cool for the CMS systems and hosting companies that get the random black eye for months or years with the left over "site hacked using WordPress on this hosting company... down for 24 hours!"  Great PR for the CMS systems and hosting companies for sure!  This does not impact the sites that took part, it impacts companies that did not take part!  Super move there...

well yeah, i mean clearly, wordpress was considered unhackable prior to this. 

My twitter

John,

This will be my only post at macheist.  I cannot even begin to tell you how annoyed I was to read of this.  As someone who spends a few hours a week hacking php/cms sites in my spare time, I think I speak for a lot of folks when I write:

I DO NOT APPRECIATE HAVING MY TIME WASTED.

I spent quite a few hours this past weekend tweaking backups, examining logs, and checking WP code to see if any of my code/sites could be vulnerable.  I have already expressed my displeasure to MT for playing along with Glenn and rest assured that I will be writing each and every developer participating in your silly contest to let them know what I think of your PR skills.

Regards,
Graham

Malcor never said he used any CMS/hosting company vulnerabilities to hack the sites. I always pictured malcor more as a social engineer then a wordpress exploit finder... he is good at working people over.  This would have been a key plot thing later in MH II had things gone as planned. 

Remember, the most vulnerable part of the security equation is people.

Scott Meinzer — I break things at MacHeist
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So obviously you missed my point completely...

Umm yeah, "malcor" may not have but did you not figure people would link the "hacking" of the site with the software powering them, nor the lack of ability of the hosting companies to "fix" the sites until "malcor" allowed them to?!?  So you start having people guessing, and blogging about the how/what and why... people thinking are my sites vulnerable (look just two posts ago in this very thread), and running to their CMS providers and hosting providers going "they got hacked, are we safe?"  So indeed you did cause this, even without "malcor" mentioning things on his own, people assume, and then panic, then post it across the web as fact... hence the actual people and companies impacted, not your site or the Mac/Apple related site you "hacked"...  Typical lack of thought into cause and effect from your actions.

Hence the apology in my post. Did you miss that part?

John Casasanta
MacHeist Director
tap tap tap chief

No, but I highly doubt every reference to these hacks across the net are going to magically get cross-references back to this apology either.  Hence my reference to the black eye that will last for months or years within Google searches finding original "hacked" news stories with no follow-ups.  Anyway, its all fun and games right...

I think the initial idea was pretty cool, but you shouldn't have made him as nerdy looking and evil. You should have made it more obvious that it could be part of a game. As in you should have had slicker designs, a real website for Malcor, etc.

My first and only post on these forums, I bought the last mac heist package but will by nothing else from this disreputable company.

You arseholes wasted everybody's time with a cheap stunt that made a lot of hosting firms look bad.  Further more you actually encouraged many mac haters to think it's 'ok' to hack Mac sites.

Disgraceful.

I have to agree. Why would anyone say they want to be involved with MH2 now!? I cant believe the people who said they are looking forward to it off the back of recent revelations.

I would also baulk at the idea Indie developers would want to be associated with this project now.

It also cost me real time in my workplace checking a few things out.

So.. uh. Seeing as Malcor was a huge part of mission 1, does this mean that MH is going to be delayed?

Haha, it wouldn't be MacHeist if it wasn't, right?

I'm less opposed to this idea now that I see it was for MacHeist and the whole charade was going to be revealed eventually. I didn't like the idea that it was all for traffic to the sites.

Nah, the hacker was a pretty cool character in the story, but not a completely necessary one. We'll have to modify some stuff I guess, but nothing too serious. Don't worry guys... it'll be good.

Co-Creator of MacHeist, Clear, Partner at tap tap tap | follow me on twitter

I accept your apology. Although it definitely got out of hand, if I had seen this plan before it happened, I probably wouldn't have expected this either... Excited for MacHeist 2, hopefully it won't be delayed from its December 7th launch (In the other thread, definetheline posted that he had sources that confirmed both that, and that MacHeist was behind the malcor attacks, he was accurate on one point, why not the other?)

Proud member of the Orange team!
Let's go into theAmazon.

I hope it doesn't get delayed much. I can imagine that this hacker story would be interesting. Well, I'm looking forward to the new beginning .

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Go Green Monkeys Go!

Well, I expect no mistakes on the Macheist 3 front. Right?

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

For MacHeist 4 they're going to make you go back in time to the year 1998 so you can covertly kidnap and brainwash the designer responsible for the Apple USB puck mouse.

They're still trying to find some way around the inevitable legal hassles from Paramount Pictures and the writers of the last Star Trek series, who are bringing a lawsuit against the Directorate for violating Paramount's copyright on clichéd plot devices.

Marathon Forever.
AppShelf: MacHeist 3 Loot
AppShelf: nanoBundle 1
Check Reciept Page for nanoBundle 2 AppShelf Files.

i actually thought that this was a pretty funny stunt.  I don't think it did any harm either.  The people who said you wasted your time with it, i have a question for you?  Did you ever have to participate in it?  No one asked you to, you  just did, so don't blame it all on the Admins here.  Honestly, you come here for 1 post to post about how you're not coming to MHII because of this, well i got news for you!  I don't give a shit, and I don't think anyone else here does either!  You don't have to come here just to tell us that, because that my friend, is a waste of your time, and my time.

I really think this is a great start for MHII, and i'm really excited for it!!

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▛▞▞▟ Proud Member of the BLUE Team™ ▙▚▚▜

I thought it was a cunning stunt!

Best Blog...

http://www.glennwolsey.com

Nice to see people finally growing a sense of humor

I personally think it's a bit of a tragedy that we all didn't get to see this through to the final drama, which was Malcor hacking macheist.com and thus revealing the hoax properly.  Ahhh well.  Props on a really cool, inventive, and obviously risky promotion guys.  I'm sure MH II will be a great success and I'm really looking forward to what that entails.

Looking through the cached copy of the Malcor blog (It's still out there) there's more than a few potentially libelous slams don't you think?

"Perpetuated most significantly by 'White Magic Labs', this is a fairly idiotic claim…"

"The most prevalent of these accusations was from "Norway's #1 Mac Portal", Mac1. First off, isn't being Norway's #1 Mac portal basically  the equivalent of winning a fingerpainting contest in kindergarten?  Anyway, this site that I never heard of before…"

You get the idea. Either it's implied that Mac1 and White Magic Labs are in on the Malcor story, or you're implying they're insignificant and so worth less to advertisers, or you're implying they're incompetent and so worth less to their customers.

So will Norwegians get a free MacHeist bundle? Will WordPress and White Magic Labs products be promoted on MacHeist?

From a purely marketing perspective, there's saying you're sorry, and there's doing you're sorry. Saying you're sorry is advertising. Doing you're sorry is marketing.

It was never set to launch Dec. 7.

John Casasanta
MacHeist Director
tap tap tap chief

Aww, you had to ruin my fun

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

...

Ninety-eight percent of the people using the internet equate "hacking" to someone stealing/guessing their MySpace password and changing their page to say they make love to sea turtles. Of course the hardcore security analysts might have gotten worried about their security, but most people would assume that Malcor had "acquired" these bloggers passwords, through either brute force or clever guessing. I don't understand how you have been slighted by MacHeist and why you're blowing this all out of proportion. So you got had by a joke, and maybe you got nervous and checked your security. Congrats, you're that much safer now than you were before. *shrugs*

EDIT: Now granted, MacApper went too far pinning it on their WordPress stuff, but that's MacApper's fault, not MacHeist's.

Anyways, on topic, I thought it was a rather entertaining opening to MH (in fact, I wasn't entirely sure if it was real or fake...), and hope that somehow the puzzle that was forming for what was obviously Heist 0 / 0.5  will be continued somehow... (Maybe make posts on random Apple forums by malcor with the binary digits in them? Could make it like a numbers station...

lol people need to settle down with this......bravo mh crew, could of been a golden start to this years festivities.

"So you’re asserting we’d hack our own and a friend’s site as a PR stunt…take a step back. Do you honestly think we’re so desperate for publicity that we’d ever do that?”
- Jamie Diamond at MacApper

I have to wonder if this itself is a carefully worded statement. It's true that MacApper didn't 'hack' itself or a friends' site. It participated in fake attack, and by the tone of it all, had no intention of ever coming clean. Were they desperate for publicity? Probably not. Did they act greedily for publicity and did they act disrespectfully towards their audience for publicity? Let's let the audience decide.

The thing that ticks me off most about the aftermath of this hoax has been the unapologetic apologies. I've heard words like "stupid", "joke", "mistake" and "poor judgement" thrown around, as if this were all an accident. I once posted a rebuttal to one of 'Malcor's' seven hundred and forty two word breathless rants about not being an attention [hog]. Someone put effort into that rant. The Malcor hoax took a lot of work, a lot of coordination, a lot of thought and could have yielded a lot of benefits for the MacHeist bottom line had it worked out the way it was supposed to. This wasn't an accident or a lapse in judgement in the sense that leaving your keys in your car are a lapse in judgement. This was a setting-aside of ethics at best, and a revelation of ethics at worst. Stop calling it a misTAKE and start apologizing for a misDEED, and for goodness sake don't try to change the topic in mid-paragraph and talk about how excited you are for a new season of deals at MacHeist.

I'm happy to forgive a misdeed, but I'm not keen on this whole, "oops, we never expected it to go this far"—where 'go this far' is Politician for 'get caught'—tone.

A couple things. I work at MacApper, and could guarantee you that Jamie Diamond who said that did not know about this at all. He was loyal to MacApper, and felt betrayed by them today. Honestly, the staff did not know.

Also, I think it was a mistake. Not malcor. Malcor was done intentionally. But do you ever think it was supposed to get out of hand like this? Miles from MacApper made a mistake when he kind of put the blame on Wordpress. He didn't have that planned out. It was just the first thing that came to mind. So I do think this was a mistake. A good idea that got out of hand. I don't think anyone could have calculated how much harm this would do in advance.

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

definetheline is right. I write for MacApper and only Miles Evans (the admin) and a few top tier editors knew about it. Believe me, they're getting an earful on the staff forums from the writers.

I accept your apology, it could have been a really good start to MH2. Personally, I will be visiting the 'hacked' sites a lot more. I've never heard of some of them and I've only heard about MacApper. Now, they're all on my bookmark bar.

Iced Cocoa | KVN Media | Vimeo | Flickr | Twitter |  PM

This drama sickens me.

We should all be laughing at how incredibly hilarious this is, not acting like MacHeist just murdered our mothers.

I mean, someone was "literally shaking" over MacHeist.

Internet: Serious Business!

You should feel really stupid... it's obvious this wasn't thought through and you didn't think of the possible consequences.
This was just the worst heist build up ever, it was way too convincing and it got out of hand.

By the way, where's Safe Deposit, Cookbook, Portal, and Atmosphere?

Give me a V!

Someone continue it!

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Give me an A!

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

Give me a P!

Give me an O!

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

Give me an R!

Give me a W!

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Give me an A!

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Give me another R!

Give me an E!

What does it spell??!?!???

the greatest blog known to mankind / twitter / flickr

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