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"AOL's Security Fiction"
Tatiana Gau is AOL's "Vice President of Integrity Assurance," and several news articles have commented on the grandeur of the title. In an apparent attempt to live up to the name, in a February 10 interview with AOL's columnist "the AOL Insider," Gau called AOL "the most protected environment on the Internet."Within weeks, hackers had accessed AOL's popular "GameWiz" area, and altered text in the title of the welcoming screen. This was in fact the second successful hack on the GameWiz area--and the third in a long string of content-area attacks to come.
In subsequent in-house memos Gau claimed only that AOL had "a higher level of network security than is available on the Internet."
A screen-shot of the first GameWiz-area attack was inserted into the hacked file library under the name GAMEWIZ.GIF. At least presumably -- the file displayed the message "not a valid GIF file" when opened in some graphics programs. However, the name corresponds with the image below, which appeared on the AOL Watch page the previous month.