China Red Cross website hacked

May 20, 2008 08:11 GMT  ·  By

It's no wonder that hackers are always out there hunting software vulnerabilities and glitches that would allow them to infiltrate into websites and servers, but when they break into the Red Cross website to steal money going to the Chinese earthquake victims, it's way too immoral. This is exactly what happened a few days ago when hackers got inside the Chinese website of the Red Cross and attempted to get access to the accounts used to store money for the earthquake victims.

According to Network World, the attackers were armed with heavy "ammunition" as they created six bank accounts open in four different banks under three different names in order to transfer the money and remain anonymous. At this time, there's no official report concerning the damages caused by the infiltration and nobody knows for sure how much money the hackers managed to transfer.

In the past few days, following the earthquake which hit China on May 12, numerous donation websites were set up, all of them with the same purpose: to allow people from all over the world to donate money in order to help the victims of the earthquake. Even the search giant Google promoted such a website through its official page, so it's no surprise that hackers attempt to infiltrate into them since a huge amount of money is transferred between bank accounts.

However, hackers have proved once again that there are no limits when it comes to finding new victims and compromising their systems. For instance, a group of hackers attacked an epilepsy website a few weeks ago, placing flashing images on it which obviously caused serious seizures to some of the visitors. The main difference is that, in the earlier case, the hackers had nothing to gain, so they did it mostly for fun but had no idea what serious consequences such an attack could have.