Wednesday 21 July 2010

Mass Defacement of Websites: Hacker Fun that Threatens Business

Kaspersky Lab presents an article entitled Mass Defacements: The Tools and Tricks by David Jacoby, a Senior Security Researcher with the company’s Global Research & Analysis Team. During his research David identified over a hundred web servers that had been infected by ‘defacers’, including web servers belonging to some high-profile companies. These infections resulted in confidential data from sites, as well as information on how to infect them, being sold on the black market. The cybercriminals were also able to use the web servers to launch DDoS attacks or conduct spam mailings.

Everyone knows that the Internet is plagued by hackers and criminals cracking websites, turning computers into nodes in botnets, and openly selling spyware and stolen passwords to user accounts on the black market. One type of cybercrime, however, remains a bit of mystery. Defacement attacks change the content or visual appearance of random websites; while the attackers are not doing this to make a direct profit, such attacks can damage the reputation of the organisations targeted, or cause financial losses.

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