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". ______________________________________ Subscribe to the InfoSec News RSS Feed http://www.infosecnews.org/isn.rss
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