Are Political Blogs More Likely to Get Hacked?
A website defacement is an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of the site. These are typically the work of system crackers, who break into a web server and replace the hosted website with one of their own. – wikipedia
Web site defacements stretch back to the birth of the Internet and continue to be a popular “black marketing” technique to get a message so quickly it’d put the Romans to shame. As more and more homes become Internet ready we are seeing different political/religious movements flooding the web 2.0 scene, sometimes with a very sinister plot.
Turkish defacer hacking US Army Website (01/2009)
Here is a picture from of a Turkish defacer going by the handle of “Agd_Scorp” after hacking into a US Army website:
Israelis Take Over Hamas’ TV Station (01/2009)
Israeli Defense Forces took over Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television station over the weekend — the latest blow in a increasingly-sophisticated information war over Gaza.
See Wired article for details.
Morocco hackers roll out virtual offensive (01/2009)
A Morocco-based Islamic group hacked into DomainTheNet’s registration system server, hijacking several domain names and defacing the websites. A screenshot of one of the defacements can be seen below:
See Jewish Journal article for details.
Yes, this really did all happen this month (Jan/2009). As Napoleon once wisely said, “the secret of war lies in the communications.”
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Comments
Shirley, I absolutely agree with you. I think political/religious innuendo are some of the more powerful human motivators and could keep a web attacker trying to gain access for months and possibly years.
Case in point for that one would be Israel being targeted constantly. Larger firms, such as BurgerKing, etc.
http://belsec.skynetblogs.be/post/6598547/burgerking-israel-hacked
So usually it’s random, but being Israeli *seems* to motivate, for example.
Almost all of my sites got hacked about a year ago, shortly after the release of an anti-Koran movie by an extreme right-wing politician from my country.
It triggered loads of website attacks by islamic hackers. One of them is on record at YouTube stating it to be his personal mission to hack at least 5000 Dutch websites per day to get revenge for this movie release.
Still politics increasing the risk. But it also shows that you don’t need to have a political blog to fall prey. Just living in a country that’s on islamic records for ‘bad behavior’ seems to do the trick…
Yes, I think that political websites ARE more likely to be hacked because the incident can be observed by the people you want to see it AND it has potential to go viral…