Hackers' battle hits new targets

By PETER GRIFFIN

The cyber-war between Chinese and United States hacking groups continued unabated yesterday.

News of website defacements continued to stream into hacker monitoring groups such as Attrition.org and www.alldas.de but not at the level predicted.

Among yesterday's victims were a number of Chinese and Taiwanese commercial websites and a smaller number of American sites.

So far there have been no reports of attacks on New Zealand websites and no signs that New Zealand's small hacking community has aligned itself with either side.

Jonathan Read, an Auckland-based web master for the anti-hacking website anti-trojan.org, told the Weekend Herald that he had detected probes of his computer originating from China and hacking activity from the region was increasing.

Australian websites, which receive an average of 40 hacking attacks daily, were also left out of the cyber-war, although a Melbourne website was subjected to two sustained attacks traced to China.

Arjon de Landgraaf, director of Auckland-based Internet security company Co-Logic, said the hackers were competing with each other to increase their tally of hacked victims, and the political spat between the US and China was just an excuse.

"For the hackers it's a game. It's not politically driven at all. There are probably about 150 vulnerabilities in a website. The hackers write a program that tries to exploit the top 20 of those. If they try 50,000 sites they may get 250. That's how it works."

Links:


Attrition

alldas