And the Russian server hosting e-mails cracked from the Climatic Research Unit was…?

[cite as: F. Bi. 2009. And the Russian server hosting e-mails cracked from the Climatic Research Unit was…? Intl. J. Inact., 2:96]

Quirin Schiermeier reports:

[…] The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich confirmed today that e-mails and documents dating from 1991 to 2009 were illegally copied and subsequently published on an anonymous Russian server.

A link to the Russian server first appeared on 19 November on a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog. The server was shut down just hours later, but the stolen material had already been distributed elsewhere on the Internet.

So I thought to myself, “which Russian server was it, and which obscure blog was it exactly?” After chasing down web links for a while, I landed up on Andrew Bolt’s blog entry [cached] which gave a link to a Russian-sounding web page: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip. (The link is broken however, and changing the protocol from http:// to ftp:// gives a “Connection refused” error.) Then again, I’m not sure Bolt’s blog counts as an “obscure” blog, so perhaps Schiermeier was referring to some other web site(s).

Meanwhile, the climate inactivists’ conspiracy-laden interpretations of the e-mails clearly pale in comparison to the things that inactivists have said in public. Greenfyre has more.

Updates

• 2009-11-22: Kevin Grandia issues a challenge to “get to the bottom of this”. And, some things we know initially about the attacker.
• 2009-11-23: There was an initial attempt to upload the .zip file to realclimate.org, and it was a crack attempt coming from a machine in Turkey.
• 2009-11-27: Timestamps on the individual files in FOI2009.zip indicate they were archived on a machine under a timezone of -0500 or -0400.
• 2009-11-28: The most recent access to the individual files was on 16 Nov.
• 2009-12-04: About the 3 files in FOI2009.zip that don’t give timezones of -0500 or -0400. Something odd’s going on with these files.
• 2009-12-08: McIntyre and Id say that the attacker’s comments on their blogs came from IP addresses. 82.208.87.170 and 212.116.220.100. And, did a system administrator just save the world?
• 2009-12-25: 13 extra bytes at the end of 5 .doc files…?
• 2009-12-26: The attacker might have obtained the CRU code and data from e-mail attachments.
• 2009-12-26, again: I’ve created a new sub-blog at http://ijish.livejournal.com/ for future commentary on the CRU crack.