Royal Australian Air Force Website Hacked

Several sections of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) website have been defaced by an Indian hacktivist. He warns the government that this is just the beginning, if attacks against Indian students living in Australia don't stop.

According to Trend Micro's Solutions Architect Rik Ferguson, who was amongst the first to report the attack, the website operated by Australia's Department of Defence was compromised at 1630 GMT on the 13th of July. The hacker, calling himself Atul Dwivedi, defaced the "Home" and "About Us" pages to display a political message.

"This site hacked by Atul Dwivedi Long live India This is a Warning message to Australian govt. immediately take all measures to stop racist attacks against Indian students in Australia else I wil [sic.] pawn all your cyber properties like this one. Jai Hind," the rogue message read.

Back in May, over 2,000 Indian students from Australia protested against violent attacks that had been happening in the country. The BBC reported at the time that 70 such incidents with Indian students as victims had occurred during the past year.

Even though the protesters described the attacks as racist violence, the police said that there was no evidence of such motives and that the crimes were most likely opportunistic in nature. Many of the assaults took place in train stations, the Indian students constantly traveling at late hours carrying valuable equipment, such as laptops, PDAs or smartphones, with them.

Apparently, the RAAF website hacker is no stranger to defacements, having hit at least one Pakistani commercial website before and leaving offensive messages to its admin. Rik Ferguson notes that the Australian Department of Defence had been notified and quickly addressed the problem.

"The fact that such a high profile website is nonetheless at risk of being defaced really illustrates the need for effective web application security, everyone is a potential victim," the security researcher concludes.