KLONDIKE, CP Army HQ – Welcome to the second edition of This Week in CPA History, where we dive in each week into our precious history! This week we will be learning about the hacking of Small Medium Army Central.
The Hacking
During the early months of 2012, the Small Medium Army Central (SMAC), one of the major news organizations for smaller armies, had been hacked three times by an unknown user. Interestingly, the Chief Executive Officer of SMAC at the time, Splasher99, noticed that the only posts that had not been deleted or altered were posts about the Purple Republic, an infamous army known for hacking Club Penguin, using bots to terrorize other armies. In addition, the last post written before the hacking was about the Purple Republic. This drew the community to question whether there was any connection between posts about the Purple Republic and the hacking of the news site.
The Purple Republic
The Purple Republic, for those who are not aware of how they terrorized armies, used crude political symbols to terrorize armies. They hacked Club Penguin often and went off the grid for long periods of time. Eventually, their last appearance was after gaining actual people in a steam group, and are most known for making racist symbols (not shown for political reasons) and banning non-purple penguins. Essentially, as the Club Penguin Army Wikipedia states, they “could be called a dictatorship, nothing close to a republic”.
An image of the infamous Purple Republic
The Nonexistent Investigation
At the time of the hacking, the news site’s only idea was to restore all the posts and recover the site. However, they did not start up much investigation into the hack. There was neither much evidence released nor was there any particular person called out. Rather, some influential members of the community simply suggested that SMAC should look for editors within the Purple Republic ranks, due to posts only being deleted, not the entire site defaced. Unfortunately, due to the limited resources that were available, SMAC could not suspect any editors with the hacking.
Aftermath
Although there’s a strong connection between the Purple Republic and the hacking, there was no culprit found. Instead, SMAC continued their regular posting and most people forgot about the incident, as the Purple Republic wouldn’t be strangers to incidents such as this. The hacking itself was dangerous for people on the site, but nobody wrote many more posts about this on SMAC or other news sites. The investigation led to a dead end, and people eventually forgot about the incident. Fortunately, armies that were informed of the Purple Republic tried to defend themselves from raids. Even if it led to dangerous consequences, SMAC carried out a great task before, trying to warn armies of the army that tried to destroy all others.
What do YOU think? Were the Purple Republic connected to the hacking of SMAC?
Let us know what YOU think in the comments below!
Pranav
CPA Headquarters Reporter
