It's a joke: Week of Vista bugs project just a prank

While the month of MySpace bugs project kicked off on schedule to start the month, another hacker campaign turned out to be an elaborate April Fools' Day joke.

The Week of Vista Bugs project was designed to play a trick on the media, but also to get people to be more security minded and realize that hoaxes such as this can happen in the same way phishing scams can occur, the organizers said.

To get their point across, the hackers spent some time tricking the security world into believing their prank was similar to the whirlwind of bug-a-day campaigns that have become popular since researcher H.D. Moore launched the Month of Browser Bugs last summer.

In this case, though, the hackers posted bogus claims to mailing lists and even created a detailed advisory that falsely revealed a "firewall bypassing" vulnerability in Vista, Microsoft's newly released operating system.

While the advisory included some humorous references, the organizers claim their joke had good intentions.

"One more time, the goal was to remember that the human factor is one of the most important in IT security," the organizers said on their Securinfos.info site. "Education is an important step to consider in security. People have, as experts do, to rely on real facts, things they can verify."

Swa Frantzen, a handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center, advised readers to be skeptical of what they find on the web.

"Just don’t believe everything you read on the internet," he said. "And forget the Week of Vista Bugs unless you urgently need a laugh."

Click here to email reporter Dan Kaplan.

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