Hack Into Durham Police Website Though Didn’t Expose Sensitive Information But Caused Inconvenience

The website of Durham Regional Police was withdrawn from the Internet late January 3, 2008 following a hacker's strike on the homepage. Technical experts remained busy the next day trying to resolve the glitch as well as trace the attacking source.

Hackers who identified themselves as the KingHack Team managed to invade the page and change the basic content related to the police force's information, media releases, and some digital images.

According to Durham police officials, hackers entered the website and overlapped the existing content with some phrases. This prank, they said appeared less elaborate than what happened in March 2007 when an intruder had posted a picture of a wolf's eyes onto the main page of the site. The phrase that appeared read, "Owned System By Scorpion_King!! Turkish Defaces!"

A Google search shows that these hackers have not deactivated websites for the first time. For, similar messages are displayed on 15,000 other websites.

However, head of corporate communications Dave Selby with the Durham police service assured that the hackers could not access any classified or sensitive information from www.drps.ca, a site for public information as there wasn't any sensitive data stored on it. Newsdurhamregion published this on January 4, 2008.

The items hosted on the site only include program updates, press releases, and public information on various services of the Durham police. Moreover since systems in the police department are fully separated therefore those systems are inaccessible as well.

Selby for DRPS explained that the site was simply the department's storefront image that they put up there. However, this particular attack could be a mischief that has created great annoyance. Selby said since the DRPS website provides information for the general public, its shut down for even a brief time means inconvenience for all.

Durham police service said it was consulting the ISP that hosts their site to figure out the method of hack and to determine steps to prevent any future breach.

Selby said the service was analyzing all options. Last time they had switched servers. But as the nature of the DRPS stands pranksters could again hack to cause embarrassment.

Related article: Hack.Huigezi Virus Attacks China PCs Rapidly

» SPAMfighter News - 1/18/2008