Hacker hits Parliament video site
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Politics
A Turkish cyber-vandal has defaced inthehouse.co.nz, the website which plays video of the debating chamber at Parliament.
The hacker Iskorpitx replaced all content on the site with an animated Turkish-like flag and the message "best regards to all world" during the weekend.
The site was back up by mid-morning today.
Iskorpitx has a long history of compromising a website's server, then over-writing it with his own "graffiti", sometimes with a political message, but usually just showing off his own talents.
He (or she) was reportedly responsible for the largest defacement in web history, successfully hacking 21,549 websites in one shot in May 2006.
At least one Beehive insider who noticed the prank - at around 10.30pm last night - was not impressed, the National Business Review reported.
"This is serious. Where is our cyber-protection?" the source said.
"Where's the certification?"
Videos of Parliamentary debate and question time are archived on the searchable site, attracting up to 6000 or more views per clip.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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A sad indictment on the state of technology awareness in our country.
This is what happens when typical NZ sentiments such as "she'll be right" and "number 8 wire" are allowed to enter sensitive roles. There's no excuse for government websites to be hacked, only incompetence.
Let's face it, it could have been worse and call a malware script installing a rootkit infecting all curious people opening the link. Standard botmaster attack vector. Why does stuff.co.nz refer to a hacked site without a disclaimer or warning?
Make him give Cyprus back
Probably because hosted overseas because New Zealand webhosting for the most part is shocking and overpriced.
Who cares about parilment tv. you'd have to be pretty sad in life to watch politicans debating. But does show the security gap in the webhost.
inthehouse.co.nz was one of 40,000 websites to be hacked over the last 3 days!!
The inthehouse.co.nz website is hosted by an American hosting company called A2 Hosting. It appears that all the websites hosted by this company have been hacked. You can read about it on the A2 Hosting forums: http://community.a2hosting.com/a2hosting/topics/a2s48_turkish_hacker
Of course the big question is: why is an NZ government website being hosted in the US? Are they trying to save a few bucks by doing the hosting on the cheap?
11:46am and it isn't hacked anymore. It was apparently reported hacked on the 18th, 2 days ago on a defacement reporting site. Quite impressive it lasted this long, especially on a government site. Slighting disappointing on the government's behalf though.
Just because the Nats want to cut back on every thing we now get cheap junk to run this country I hope this wakes the MPs up from sleeping on the job and stop looking for reds under there beds. Just close the dam doors please.
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This is not a NZ Government website 'per se', as it is a dot co dot nz, not a dot govt dot nz. It is funded by parliament, but as already stated, hosted on a US server which had been compromised. If a hacker breaks into a few unsecured FTP sites hosting videos, it is not in the same league as say a GCSB hack. Embarassing, yes; national security risk, no.