US government websites are under the spotlight of muslim cracking groups who protest against USA – this is what they claim as an attack reason. Since the 2nd of January, 17 US governmental websites were defaced, from which 9 were defaced by means of SQL injection.

What seems obvious to me – after viewing most of those defacements on the Zone-H digital attacks archive – is that their motives are not fully justified. Most of these crackers – better say “script kiddies” – are using publicly available exploits for known vulnerabilities, and by applying logic on how to use them, they succeed in the end at gaining access on webservers.

The fact that the attacked webservers belong to the US government, doesn’t necessarily mean that there is adequate security implemented.

Apart from the little warning/disclaimer that they put on their websites as a scare tactic for crackers, there is very little done on tracing and catching the crackers who successfully broke into their webservers. Setting up honeypots on their systems in order to track the techniques and methodologies which are used by crackers, is certainly helpful knowledgewise.

In the mind and soul of the crackers who deface high-profiled websites, there is a false sense of pride. They think that it reflects their cracking skills and status in the defacers scene. For them, defacing is more like a game. The messages shown in their defacements, are more like an excuse for taking part in this game. The real motivation and reasoning behind their attacks, in most of the cases is not political, patriotic or other; but is just to show off themselves and their country to the world…

They attach a nickname to their personalities and cracking abilities, and they try to raise its status in the scene. They like searching for their nicknames in news websites and showing off the link to other crackers in their IRC channel, other channels, or through their websites.

Below is the list of all the *.gov websites that were defaced in the past 27 days, along with the OS that they run:

(Visit Zone-H.org to view the defacements)

https://www.cahps.ahrq.gov/content/cahpsOverview/faqanswer.asp Win 2000
http://learnabouteva.dgs.virginia.gov/FAQ Win 2003
http://mail.vi.gov/ibh.html Win 2003
http://webmail.vi.gov/index.html Win 2003
http://nd.gov/ndins/communications Linux
http://hca.montgomerycountymd.gov/govtmpl.asp Win 2000
http://fairfaxva.gov/personnel/Jobs.asp Win 2003
http://cstx.gov/home/index.asp Win 2000
https://ssl.cstx.gov/csjobs/job_list.asp Win 2000
http://oss.monroecounty-fl.gov/1923tg.htm Win 2000
http://asc.gov/default.aspx Win 2003
http://eppcapps.ky.gov/earthday/ideas.aspx Win 2003
http://tncarefraud.tennessee.gov/newsAndInfo.aspx Win 2003
http://floydcounty.in.gov Win 2000
http://radsite.lbl.gov/testhost.htm FreeBSD
http://hobbes.lbl.gov/ibh.htm FreeBSD
http://floyd.lbl.gov/ibh.htm FreeBSD
http://archivesindex.sc.gov Win 2000
https://fortress.wa.gov/dshs/f2ws03esaapps/stars/newsarchive.asp FreeBSD

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