AskMorris information - About Hacking

Last week was a busy week for many businesses.Especially the big ones. New York Times, CNN and even Microsoft was hacked. It is very difficult to completely protect yourself in a more and more unruly and wild-west-like internet world.

And of course AskMorris Inc. will be the first one to admit that even we too have had our share of attacks. And one was even successful!!

Below is an extract from one the experts in the field showing how even the 'big ones' bite the dust from time to time.
====== EXTRACT FROM F-SECURE =====================

Tuesday, August 16, 2005
"Breaking" the news Posted by Ero @ 23:46 GMT

The Internet Storm Center reports that the case being followed by CNN is, most likely, mainly restricted to their network. Either Zotob or an RBot variant seem to be behind this. RBot has been discovered today and exploits LSASS and the PnP vulnerabilities.

Worms going around Posted by Ero @ 23:33 GMT

Apparently there was a good deal of unpatched systems. As it seems, even computers at CNN, ABC and The New York Times have been going down. No exact culprit at this point but one or several of the recently released worms epxloiting MS05-0039 such as Zotob are probably the ones responsible.

We are monitoring the situation.
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As far as our own mishappening, it occurred on June 17th-2005, during one of the worst typhoons in Taiwan's history. Naturally, nobody was in our office when a group of so called 'hackers' decided to stage an attack on us. They successfully managed to exploit a small security hole that hadn't been patched and defaced a web page on one of our sites.

The relevant page was restored quickly and all in all the defacement was up for about 8 hours. We know who the perpetrators are and where they operate from. This just once again shows that it is hard to have a 100% secure website, especially since the internet changes and develops pretty much on a daily basis.

ABOUT SECURITY
All you can do is try your very best to check all your code, check and patch all servers at all times and generally work hard on informing and training both one's staff and clients in security procedures. However, the internet will most likely never be that innocent place it once used to be way back in the day.

So after 3 1/2 years of being in Taiwan, we have so far had only one unfortunate incident. And even though it seems strange to some, we still choose to salute the group known as X T E C H for their skills even though some would be deragatory on their methods, efforts and purpose.