US Government Websites Hacked; Team System DZ Responsible

It has been reported that many Government websites, many of them in Ohio, were hacked recently, with a message that purports to be supportive of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Commenting on this, Itsik Mantin, director of security research at Imperva, said: “Website defacement attacks are probably the most common and easy-to-mount class of web attacks. The group Team System DZ that is claimed to be behind this attack has history of defacement attacks for political purposes and, from previous analysis of incidents attributed to them, it seems that their way of work is mostly opportunistic, using basic hacking tools like brute force on admin passwords on large number of sites of interest, and once finding sites that are unprotected, take over these sites and plant the group’s message in the site.

"Without referring specifically to this incident, and regardless of the actual method that was used in this attack, the sad fact is that even today, after at least 20 years of research of web attacks and mitigations, and with numerous web attack protection solutions available in the market, still significant portion of web applications are vulnerable to some of the oldest trick in the web attack book, like password brute force.”