Another Case of Hacking City Website

A Turkish hacker on November 18, 2006 attacked the Website of the city of Las Cruces for the second time in two days. The hacker posted pictures showing violence and blood from Israel's war. The pictures and the text in a foreign language showed on the city Police Department section of the Website. City spokesman, Udell Vigil, said that to ensure the security, the section was closed down and will remain so till Monday.

The Sun-News on Saturday notified city officials about the site's hacking. Subsequently, they cleared the images from the Website by 3 p.m. After receiving the news from Sun-News, Denise LaFrance, a city spokeswoman said that they immediately engaged a site specialist to clean the Las Cruces Website. LaFrance said that they rectified the problem, brought down the site and erased the images. She further informed that they were also ensuring prevention of another hack and keeping everything about the site secured.

LaFrance said that the Las Cruces main site was also hacked on Friday. However, the first hacking attempt didn'tpost any message or violent picture on the site.

On Saturday, whoever clicked onto the city police department's news release section found a four-letter explanatory note flashing in a box besides the picture of Chief Harry Romero.
On clicking the expletive, the box became full of anti-Israeli messages and pictures. Some pictures showed Israeli soldiers pointing machine guns at small children. Pictures of dead bodies, including children, were also posted on the site. The Turkish hacker who said he hacked the Las Cruces Website is the same person who claimed to have hacked major company Websites like Sony, ABC and CNN. It is apparent the Turkish hacker is operating against city websites from Holland and Turkey. According to one of the Websites, the same hacker has intruded 38,000 sites.

There are cases of site hacking of small towns too like one in Rhode Island in September 2006. It too had pictures similar to the Las Cruces site. This shows hackers use city websites as their favorite medium.

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» SPAMfighter News - 11/23/2006