S'kiddies munch Burger King

Burger King executives mulling the effect of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease on their business had more bad news this morning when they woke up to find the firm's UK Web site had been defaced by Internet vandals.

The site, burgerking.co.uk, was defaced by a hacker calling himself Dreamscape, with a message poking fun at the burger chain and the security level of the site's IIS Web server.

In part, the message, which has been mirrored on defacement archive Attrition.org and can be seen in full here, said: "How's this for Burger King's slogan... Our life evolves around frozen foods. Suck my wanker, doodz."

On a related point, we came across a survey by a firm called Pilot Networks (a provider of outsourced intrusion detection) which found a 58 per cent increase in attempts to attack servers between January this year and December 2000. Attempts to scan for vulnerable domain name server, a technique employed by hackers who had a pop at McDonald's last week, were up 280 per cent over the same period.

All this provides evidence that s'kiddies are on the prowl and you really need to lock up the security of your Web server if you want to avoid becoming a victim of attack. Let's be careful out there. ®

Related stories

McHackers use DNS exploit to poke fun
Intel hacker talks to The Reg

External links

Pilot Network's report on the frequency, type, and apparent origin of internet attacks