http://www.mb.com.ph/INFO2005092345065.html By melvin G. calimag Sept 23, 2005 To illustrate how hacking and cracking have become widespread in the Internet, a security firm said the Philippines is the only country in the Southeast Asian (SEA) region, and possibly in the whole world, whose military domain address (mil.ph) has been hacked several times in the last six years. A study conducted by Tipping Point, a new division of Internet equipment maker 3Com that focuses on intrusion prevention, revealed the website of the Philippine Navy hosted under the mil.ph domain has been defaced several times. From 1999 to 2005, a total of nine attacks were recorded under the country's military domain name, said 3Com senior manager for security Ken Low in a recent press briefing. As expected, commercial websites belonging to the com.ph domain name topped the list with 204 intrusions. Next came government websites connected to the gov.ph domain name with 146 attacks, followed by school websites in edu.ph with 75, then websites belonging to .ph with 71, succeeded by .org.ph with 20, and finally net.ph with 9 attacks - the same as the military. All in all, a total of 550 hacking activities were instigated against the Philippines during the period. The top hackers who launched defacement activities against Philippine websites were Darkhunter (24), Dcoder (20), Filipino Hacker (18), Hateful Soulz (16), Red Eye (14), Cyber Attack (12), Ir2dex (11), F4kelive (11), and M@trix (10). "These attacks would also show that there would always be hackers out there waiting to pounce on vulnerabilities. They don't stop," Low said, stressing that hackers are growing in numbers and apprehending one of them would not necessarily solve the problem. He said instead of engaging in the useless exercise of going after the hackers, the public should be educated on the importance of protecting their websites against possible intrusion. This was essentially the same message imparted by Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) chair Virgilio Peņa during his opening talk at the ManilaCon security confab last September 14. "Laws will never catch up with technology. So what we need is a campaign to increase the awareness level of the people on security," Peņa said. For Tipping Point's Low, he said companies must also realize that traditional defenses like firewalls and detection systems are simply not enough to ward off vicious attacks. "Instead of intrusion detection, the way to go is intrusion prevention. This way, intrusions can be stopped even before they are launched," he said. Tipping Point also announced it has appointed TouchMedia Inc. as the local distributor for its security solutions. _________________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org
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