On Monday, September 26, 2011, I visited the online news paper Plumasnews.com. I visit this and many other newspaper sites in my area on a daily basis. I was only somewhat surprised to see a "HACKED" splash screen indicating the the newspapers web server had been defaced. A couple days later (Wednesday) ThreatPost.com reported that this site and an estimated 700,000 other websites hosted by California based hosting provider InMotion had been exploited and defaced.
Todd Robinson of InMotion wrote, "The hacker used a system exploit to change a system password to allow him to access index files. We have blocked the exploit and changed the system password. As always though, it is recommended that you update your Cpanel and FTP passwords... Our systems team has blocked the exploit and is aggressively scanning for any other potential exploits."
The hacker using the handle Tiger-M@te claimed responsibility and stated in a message "I hack 700000 websites in one shot, this may be a new world Record. After submitting 200,000 domains,zone-h was going down again and again and became almost unresponsive in the end.so i was unable to submit all websites.so i’ve listed all domains in attachment. It was not just a server hack, actually whole data center got hacked."
Source: ThreatPost.com
Posted by
Mike Wright
