Here’s what the website of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho normally looks like:
And here’s what it looked like for a few hours on Saturday after a hacker defaced it with images of Star Wars hate figure Jar Jar Binks and Osama bin Laden.
The footballer’s website was attacked by a hacker calling himself “Terrorist MC”, who wrote a number of messages in Arabic alongside a claim in English that he would not stop hacking:
Im muslim For ever , I love Oussama ben laden
I dont Stop The Hacking, F*** Obama F*** America
Quite what Ronaldinho has done to anger a hacker enough to compare him to Jar Jar Binks is beyond me.
But there’s a serious message here. Whether you’re a big corporation, a small business or an individual, you need to protect your web presence or risk having hackers plant malware, spam pages or a mischievous message on your site.
Fortunately it looks like the attack against Ronaldinho’s website was more akin to electronic graffiti than an attempt to infect visiting computers with malware, but it still requires someone to spend time and effort cleaning up afterwards.
The best thing to do is to prevent the attack happening in the first place, by ensuring that you’re taken the appropriate steps to maximise security on your website.
If you haven’t already done so, check out our free technical paper about “Securing websites”, which discusses common ways web servers are attacked and the various ways they can be protected.
