Australian internet porn filters cracked by 16-year old schoolboy

Australia's $84 million porn filtering program has succumbed to apparently trivial disabling attacks by two users -- one of them a 16-year old schoolboy from Melbourne. The government web site offers three alternative filtering products, one of which (either Optenet or Safe Eyes) Tom Wood has found a so far unspecified way to disable within 30 minutes from scratch. Reportedly, this crack is leaving the impression the filter is still working. He subsequently turned his attention to one of the other offerings, Integard, the only Australian product in the set, and apparently cracked it in about 40 minutes.

Independently, Australian freelance IT journalist Adam Turner picked Optenet at random from the set of three offerings. He rapidly discovered that the Optenet services were visible in the Windows Task Manager and could be stopped from there. Although the services soon restarted automatically, there was time to access a web site that the program should have blocked. Turner further found that the program's logs could easily be located and deleted, removing the evidence of his browsing. However the changes he made to the system did fall foul of the TPM chip in his computer, locking him out at one stage. Nevertheless, the apparently trivial task of circumventing these porn filters does little to justify their multi-million dollar price tag to the Australian government.

(mba)