D.O.M group members arrested
17/05/2008 Written by minor
Members of D.O.M - group, whose defacements are mirrored in our defacement archive - were arrested by Spanish police. Five members are suspected of "hacking into or outright disabling thousands of Internet pages", AP informed recently,.
The members of the group are at age 16 to 20. Investigation started as the group defaced website of a Spanish political party Izquierda Unida shortly after general election in March. During a recent round of interviews, they painted themselves as "IT enthusiasts, with an attitude to help administrators".
The full list of D.O.M defacements contained in our archive can be viewed here.
NATO Cyber defence center created
17/05/2008 Written by minor
Year ago, Estonia was a target of massive DoS attack. Now defense secretaries from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuana, Germany, Italy, Spain and Slovakia signed agreement to create research center for defense against cyber attacks, International Herald tribune informed.
Center will be based in Estonia and should be operational already in August this year. Countries involved in this initiative will provide staff and funding.
Web defacements 2007 in sharp decrease (-37%). Is it a good news or bad news?
21/03/2008 Written by Roberto Preatoni
We recently published the 2007 statistics based on the data collected by Zone-H. One of the most interesting fact is the sharp decrease (-37%) of the attacks compared to the attacks reported the previous year. In fact, while in year 2006 we filed 752,361 attacks, in year 2007 the reported attacks were "only" 480,905. Since the end of the 90s, when the first mirror archives (Alldas, Safemode, Attrition) started to track website defacements, this is the first time ever that the trend is showing a negative figure.
Usually from year to year, we were used to see an average increment of about 30% (in year 2005 the reported attacks were 493,840).
Is this a good news or a bad news? Certainly website defacements are loosing popularity. A few years ago a Microsoft defacement would have hit the news, today there's no more hype among journalists in reporting such fact. We just got used to it, period.
The interesting question is: if the Internet user-base is getting larger and larger and if the systems are getting weaker and weaker, why the website defacements are decreasing by strong figures?
We do have an answer and to explain it to you we have to go back with our memories in year 2005...
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...