14 DAY TRIAL // A hacker that goes under the name of ElSurveillance defaced the website of a small UK town, Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
The website in question belonged to the Stratford town council, and ElSurveillance managed to get access to the server and leave a defacement message behind, containing his logo, a Qur'an verse, his Twitter page link, and a Twitter hashtag for one of his other operations, #EscortsOffline.
We had previously followed ElSurveillance's actions, the hacker being unique among all his peers because in the past he seemed interested in defacing only escorts and adult-themed websites.
This seemed something not in his nature, so we asked him why and how.
"I have zero interest in compromising government websites, unless they cross the line, then I will be saying it directly in the defacement," ElSurveillance told Softpedia.
MySQL vulnerability let the hacker in
"The only reason why I defaced Stratford is because I wanted them to secure their server," he also added. "I found it way too easy to hack it," said ElSurveillance, who also shared the fact that a glaring MySQL security flaw allowed him to gain access to the server.
"It didn't take me longer than 4 minutes to go in and out," the hacker said, highlighting the weak security measures employed by the site. "Even the users' passwords were in plain-text."
"No data was taken because I'm not really interested," ElSurveillance also told us, saying that all of his actions were, in this case, just a warning shot for other webmasters.
The Stratford website was actually defaced twice
"The other reason why I defaced it is because they don't really take the security very seriously even when you report it to them. Sometimes they come back to you a month later or sometimes they don't even come back to you," ElSurveillance explained.
The reason ElSurveillance seems to be so angry at the site's security personnel is that, after he defaced the website, the site's webmaster restored the homepage with no further changes. So, naturally, he defaced the website again, in the same way.
Now, the Stratford-upon-Avon town council website is under maintenance, and somebody in its tech department has learned their lesson after all.
Stratford town council https://t.co/1s30d9Ht3j - Hacked - https://t.co/vMOcNbx64U @TheHackersNews @PogoWasRight @campuscodi @TruthIzSexy
— ◖المـــراقــــــبة◗™ (@ElSurveillance) January 8, 2016
