Information Warfare: June 27, 2002

Archives

Russian president Putin spent ten months and a lot of money to build an impregnable web page. Defacing web pages (a hacker sneaks into the server and replaces the main page with the hackers, usually obscene, message) has become a popular activity. This is especially true with the web pages of celebrities and political figures. For such people, not to have a web page marks them as technologically backward and not with it. Putin's new web page experienced over a hundred attempted hacks in the first 24 hours it was online on June 20th. His staff said the web page was almost a hundred percent impregnable. Perhaps not for long, as it was revealed that the server the web page was running on contained an older version of the Apache server software. This version, and some versions of the Unix operating system it runs under, it was recently announced, contain  major security flaws. Putin is not popular with Russian hackers, in particular, and Russian Internet users in general. Putin has ordered several new security activities that monitor various types of Internet activity.