Malicious Defiler of Three Websites in Arkansas Stirs Surprise

Kerem125, a graffiti artist on the Internet who splashed anti-war messages on the Websites of Harvard University and United Nations, recently attacked Arkansas sites on November 21, 2007.

The attacker, who claims to be a hacker, defaced three sites - the charitable THEA Foundation of North Little Rock, the state Department of Parks and Tourism site, and Aristotle, an Internet company based in Little Rock.

When Paul Leopoulos working for THEA Foundation visited his organization's site on the morning of November 21, he saw the distortion on it for the first time, Leopoulos said. NWAnews reported this on November 22, 2007. The site, which promotes art for the betterment of youth, no longer showed the charitable messages of the Foundation, rather there were those from the defiler covering the pages, Leopoulos added.

Leopoulos said that he couldn't guess the reason behind the attack. Later on the same day of the attack, the Foundation removed the hacker's slogans from the site and in its place posted an announcement saying that because of a hacker's malicious interference, the Website had been temporarily shut down.

A similar attack affected the Website of the Parks Department. The agency too did not know why it happened while they examined the problem, according to a spokesman. On November 21, the unchanged site, 1800natural.com, was accessible but in the morning, some links on the site led to Kerem125's inserted content.

At the Little Rock Internet company Aristotle, which constructs and operates the Website of the state, J.D. Robinson elucidated that the attacks didn't seem to be technically from a professional hacker, NWAnews reported on November 22, 2007. Hacking, which involves accessing and downloading data, did not happen with Aristotle's site. Instead, it was more like vandalism where Internet destructors exploit some program weakness to circulate their messages, Robinson explained.

Earlier in 2007, hackers, claiming to be Kerem125, altered pages that published UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's statements. They also attacked the site of a travel agency when they called themselves Turkish defacers. And in the attack on the UN site, they blamed the US and Israel for killing children.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/7/2007