Simon Willison’s Weblog

How the RIAA was hacked

23rd September 2002

The Register: Want to know how RIAA.org was hacked? They had an un-password-protected admin panel listed in their robots.txt file. Muppets.

Posted 23rd September 2002 at 7:02 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026
My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026

This is How the RIAA was hacked by Simon Willison, posted on 23rd September 2002.

robots-txt 10 security 579

Next: How to install Mozilla on Bath University PCs

Previous: Blogging my lecture notes

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/09/23/howTheRiaaWasHacked