Somebody has to do the Dirty work
17/03/2008 Written by Roberto Preatoni
Originally posted on Sunnet Beskerming’ site, then Slashdotted, then was reported also by The Register
The team at Zone-H is currently questioning the merit of continuing to update and maintain their well known defacement archive service given the negative sentiment directed at them that many people express when they find out that they have been compromised and the discouraging trend of site defacers using the archive as an informal ranking board, with some striving for the highest number of defacements recorded in the archive.
Having become the leading archive of defaced sites following the demise of the Alldas archive (the Zone-H archive is now more than 200 times larger than Alldas was at its peak), Zone-H has become a valuable resource for Information Security, even more valuable when the numerous other services that the company offers are considered. However, the continuation of the archive isn’t the only problem that Zone-H has had to face in recent months, with the arrest of their founder, Roberto Preatoni in relation to an Italian spying scandal.
To mirror or not to mirror?
05/03/2008 Written by Roberto Preatoni
Six years have passed since Zone-H.org appeared first on the Internet. It’s a long time, especially when talking about Internet based entities.
The reason why we decided to open up Zone-H was that we understood at that time the importance of having a mirror archive looking up for what was going on on the Internet and the other famous mirror archives were slowly dying (Safemode, Attrition, Alldas).
At that time, the best mirror archive was Alldas which had 12,500 mirrors archived in its database. Today, Zone-H has nearly 2,600,000 defacements archived in its own database.
Something to be proud of? Yes and no.
What are we proud of, and what aren’t we proud of? The question is itchy…
Statistics report 2005-2007
04/03/2008 Written by Marcelo Almeida (Vympel)
Every year, Zone-H publishes stats of registered attacks.
In the early months of Zone-H, we received an average of 2.500 notifications per month, last year this average jumped to 37.915 monthly attacks. In order to have better idea of the attacks number, during January 2007, 62.092 attacks were validated, and in the month of June — when a DDoS cyberwar in Russia paralyzed thousands of web sites, Zone-H included — we validated 17.797 defacements. The record occurred in the month of August 2006, with 130.645 registered attacks.
In the past the most attacked operating system was Windows, but many servers were migrated from Windows to Linux…
Chinese shopping @ 3Com
04/03/2008 Written by Roberto Preatoni
Bain and Huawei’s $2,2bn first attempt to buy out 3Com has been amended with a second offer, under which the Chinese networking giant and the Investment Fund plan to gain control of the American networking giant, but having “limited access” to 3com’s security products. This amendment has been introduced after the Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investments launched an investigation aimed to block the deal, fearing possible implications in having a Chinese company so much close to key security products, currently used by the American government’s IT infrastructures. Further skepticism was raised by those who didn’t forget that Huawei’s founder Mr. Ren Zhengfei was also a former Chinese People Liberation Army officer…
New Zealand teenager's exploit prove hacking advances
04/03/2008 Written by From the world
London, England, 3rd March 2008 – News that an 18-year-old New Zealand teenager allegedly at the centre of an international cybercrime network has been charged with various hacking crimes on Friday is proof that advances in hacking techniques are moving at an astonishing speed and that millions of users don’t have adequate protection against the latest threats, says Tier-3’s Geoff Sweeney.