Defacement archive Zone-h gets defaced

Web graffiti attack harks back to age of innocence

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 13th February 2009 18:10 GMT

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Defacement archive Zone-h.org has itself been defaced.

The hack - claimed in the names of Cyber-Terrorist, HeLL cYbEr, and Jurm - involved posting a link to a YouTube video and dancing babies on the site's altered home page. The Arab language video, featuring an ad promoting nappies, replaced the site's usual content of information security commentary and a defacement archive.

A message that came with the defacement suggested hackers pwned the site for want of something better to do.

Sorry, but I am bored I wish you a fun time with the song :D lol

Zone-h.org was unavailable on Friday afternoon following the hack, recorded here.

The site runs Apache on a Linux platform, according to Netcraft.

Maintaining a defacement archive is a pretty thankless task. For one thing, it's a lot of work. For another, neither defacers nor sys admins of defaced sites will thank you for your efforts.

It's not the first time Zone-h.org has been hit by hackers. The defacement archive was the victim of a domain hijack attack in January 2007.

Zone-h.org founder Roberto Preatoni was open with its preference for winding down the site when we met him at the Infosec conference in London last April. If it is put to rest, zone-h.org will go the way of Alldas.de and other broadly defacement projects of the past.

That's perhaps a little unfortunate. Last year, in a poll on whether or not Zone-h.org should die, a majority wanted the site to continue. But in an age where SQL injection assaults against legitimate sites are used to run drive-by download attacks without leaving any obvious signs of attack, perhaps the recording of blatant web graffiti attacks is no longer as relevant as it once was. ®

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