I’ve read some interesting articles here in Swedish local news papers about a contest going on among various hacker groups. Their latest actions, which they probably consider as something fun and a good way to show of for the other groups that they are better then the others and that have been proved by taking down as many sites as they can in one go.
On the night of Saturday around 4000 Swedish sites were hacked by a bunch of script kiddies which probably call themselves for hackers. It seems a new contest have popped up among these low lives, and that’s basically to take down as many sites as possible on the net.
- We have never seen anything similar. Just some individual costumer servers have been hacked before, but such mass hacking as this one is something new to us, said Ronnie Heidenborn, vice president for the web hotel webcows that got hacked.
The attack was success, they entered the web hotel’s dns server and directed the visitors from thousands of web sites to another site, where you could find a list of the 3 800 sites that had suffered from the attack, and a bragging message that said:
Our rivals managed 1600 sites. Count how many we managed.
The attack seems to be a answer to the attack earlier this week that was targeted towards Proinets servers when 1600 sites were erased.
- They had tried for several hours before finally succeeding in entering the system. Three of our servers were hit of which two we managed to restore, said Kjetil Jensen who works in support at Proinet.
- We get the feeling that some kind of contest is taking place, said Ronnie Heidenborn at Webcows.com and adds that the “hackers” surprised them in the way they gained access.
- They exploited a vulnerability, went in and altered ip addresses and were kind enough to erase the logs, but we have other loggers that lie in the background and register everything that happens. Hopefully we’ll be able to trace the ones that did this.
He also said that this will be reported to the police and they’ll take over it from there.
The sites of the victims were restored within 5-6 hours after the attack and everything is back to normal.
My personal response to this, sadly script kiddies exist, personally I’d like to see them eliminated, after all it’s them who brought the bad meaning to hacker and hacking. Today people associate these terms with something bad. Hopefully this contest won’t last for a long period of time. In the meantime make sure to make backups in case your web hotel becomes the next victim.
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