14 DAY TRIAL // In an ironic twist of fate, Zone-h.org, which serves as an archive of website defacements, has been itself defaced. The hackers left a message claiming boredom made them do it and posted a video with an Arabic diaper commercial featuring dancing babies.
Website defacements follow the same concept as the graffiti messages that urban "artists" leave on other people's or public property. They involve either altering the home page of a website in order to display a message or replacing it entirely with a custom one.
There are a wide variety of reasons that push hackers to deface websites. Hacktivists do it to protest political decisions or military conflicts, other hackers do it out of revenge or to discredit someone, while some do it just because they think its fun.
Various web defacement archives have been around at one point or another, but most of them closed down, mainly because they require time to maintain and update, while the benefits are basically inexistent, especially since such acts of web vandalism are not as popular as they used to be.
Zone-h was one of the last few of its kind, but according to The Register, its owner, Roberto Preatoni, was planning to gradually shut it down. This attack, assumed by several hackers going by the handles of Cyber-Terrorist, HeLL cYbEr and Jurm, might actually mark the end of the security portal, given that the website is still down, even though web defacements are rather easy to reverse.
"Sorry, but I am bored. I wish you a fun time with the song :D lol," reads the message left by the hackers. In addition, they also posted the output of the Linux "uname" command, which reveals that the webserver is running on "Linux ubuntu1 2.6.24-22-server #1 SMP Mon Nov 24 20:06:28 UTC 2008 x86_64."
In addition to the defacement archive, Zone-h is a source for security news, advisories, guides, as well as malware analyses and research. A forum system was also serving the community of users, who regularly visited the portal.
Recent defacements that we reported included that of the German Interior Minister's website, which was hacked by civil liberties activists protecting the new telecommunications wiretapping legislation and the introduction of the new European biometric passports. Palestinian supporters also hacked and defaced the websites of multiple Israeli media outlets, the U.S. Army, NATO and UNICEF Italy, during the recent armed conflict in the Gaza Strip.