Turkish hacker strikes Down Under

iskorpitx brings down 600 NZ sites

Legendary Turkish hacker iskorpitx has turned his attention Down Under with an attack that grounded the websites of nearly 600 Kiwi businesses and about 300 international sites hosted by the same US-based web server.

As stuff.co.nz reports, "in each case the content of a site's homepage was replaced with an animated medieval knight, Turkish pop music, and a cryptic Turkish message".

Vodafone owned ISP ihug was the worst hit, though several other ISPs are also thought to have been involved. The problem affected sites hosted on a US server run by quik.com, the New Zealand subsidiary of which was bought by ihug last year. Only those ihug customers that were inherited as a result of the purchase were vulnerable to the hack.

Though the security weakness was supposedly fixed yesterday, many of the affected sites still remain offline, their homepages replaced with the quik internet logo (examples here and here).

iskorpitx is estimated to have made about 180,000 attacks in his career, including one that has been labelled the "biggest in history". In this attack he reportedly hacked 21,459 websites in one shot and defaced all with a picture of the Turkish flag and this missive:

"HACKED BY iSKORPiTX

(TURKISH HACKER)

FUCKED ARMANIAN-FUCKED FRANCE-FUCKED GREECE-FUCKED PKK TERROR

A list of his hacking history can be found here. ®