Hacker strikes 600 business sites

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/nelsonmail/3960894a6420.html

By REUBEN SCHWARZ 
The Dominion Post 
14 February 2007

Nearly 600 websites belonging to Kiwi businesses have been hijacked by a 
Turkish computer hacker.

Sunday's attack hit Kiwi websites, plus about 300 international sites 
hosted on the same United States-based web server. The Kiwi websites 
were hosted mainly by Vodafone-owned internet provider Ihug.

In each case, the content of a site's homepage was replaced with an 
animated mediaeval knight, Turkish pop music, and a cryptic Turkish 
message.

The security weakness which let the hacker in was fixed yesterday.

The hacker, calling himself "iskorpitx", has made about 180,000 attacks 
since 2003.

An informal survey conducted by The Dominion Post suggests about 94 per 
cent of the roughly 575 hacked websites surveyed were hosted by Ihug.

The attack happened on a US web server run by internet provider Quik. 
com. Ihug had some customers hosted there that it inherited when it 
bought the New Zealand subsidiary, Quik. co.nz, last year.

Ihug spokeswoman Annabel Gould said Ihug is considering offering 
compensation to affected customers. Where possible it will move 
customers to its own "far-more secure servers".


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