Wednesday, August 16, 2006

"Team-Evil Arab hackers" go anti-Zionism

It's easy to argue over names. But I'm not going to. If "Team-Evil Arab hackers" is what these guys want to call themselves, that'll do for me. This group have taken down over 750 Israeli servers, and not content have now started targetting Jewish servers mentioning Zionism. Jerusalem Post and Haaretz each have articles on them. Their connection with Zionism on the Web started when the the European Union of Jewish Students server was taken down. ZionismOnTheWeb was included in the initial round of e-mails and helped assess the risk and severity of the problem.

We then backed up our servers. 48 hours later, we were hit. Having found multiple scripts runing on the server, we began disabling them before the site was defaced. Removing all those we found and upgrading some software left us feeling relativly safe. It didn't last. A few hours after reporting the site cleaned up, our forums, blogs, and photo gallery were defaced exactly the same way as WUJS.

Through the night we battled with Team Evil. We plugged gaps and restricted access, they opened a new gap and injected php scripts. Eventually with the aid of our ISP we restored completly from the back up and rapidly reimplemented fixes. This threw them, but only for an hour or two. Soon the blogs were down again.

In a last ditch effort, we disabled the blogs. The forums (which now seemed secure) went as well while we checked them (and manually disabled code that had a security flaw). The Zionism On the Web forum is now back online. Our blogs at Zionism On The Web are disabled, so it's just as well we have this extra external blog going. For more info on Team Evil or to post your own experience... see the Hacked Topic in our Zionism forums.

For those that are interested, all the attacks originated from the Saudi Network Information Center, ISU, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. The Internet Services Unit (ISU) is the department of King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST) responsible for providing Internet services throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

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