14 DAY TRIAL // The American website of Plextor, a well known brand of optical disc drives, network storage solutions, portable hard disks and other devices, has been defaced by a hacker on Sunday.
The hacker, who calls himself "ViciOuS," replaced the site's homepage with a message in Turkish which Google had a hard time translating.
However, it does seem it contained the words "disaster" and "revenge," so it might well be political in nature.
The usual "greetz" posted by defacers were present and the hacker seems to be part of a crew called "SaBoTaJ."
According to CdrInfo.com, the website that spotted the hack, Plextor has been notified and the problem was fixed.
However, this is not the first time when www.plextoramericas.com was targeted. According to Web defacement archive Zone-H, the site was defaced in June 2010 by another Turkish hacker named "Ux0r."
Also, according to the archive, ViciOuS hacked an impressive number of 6,056 websites in less than two months, between December 26 and February 12. 5,819 shared the IP addresses with at least another defaced website.
Giving that ViciOuS apparently specializes in mass defacements, it's likely that plextoramericas.com wasn't targeted individually, but rather ended up as collateral damage when a Web server was hacked.
There doesn't seem to be any discrimination between the TLDs this hacker targets or the operating systems used on the servers. The vast majority are Linux, because that's what most Web hosting providers use, but we've also seen Windows 2008, Windows 2003 and FreeBSD in the stats.
Hackers like ViciOuS, who go after any type of website, from anywhere in the world and hosted on any operating systems, don't usually have a particular agenda. Instead they are seeking the respect of their peers and want their skill acknowledged.