Well, now that I’ve had some time to snoop about the internet some looking up information, I seem to have learned some more about my good buddy Xoron who hacked my site the other day. It piqued my interest that I suddenly had 19 referrals from a “cyber-security.org”. Upon investigating, that particular domain seemed to be nothing but a shallow webpage cover for “cyber-warrior.org” — the site seemed to be in Turkish, but what really caught my attention was the large green star and crescent that made up the beginning of the cyber-warrior logo.
“Fair enough,” I thought. “Xoron must be a Turkish hacker who was showing off on this Turkish website.” Out of curiosity, however, I started searching the web for more sites that have been defaced by Xoron. Then I found this image on a Brazilian site that he had hacked. Whatever doubts I had before are now gone: I was targeted for my political (and possibly religious) views.
Whatever humor I could previously see in the whole incident is gone. I have no problem with hackers, and this particular hacker was not particularly nasty (he didn’t delete anything, just changed passwords, labels, etc) but I DO have a MAJOR issue with being targeted for my opinions. The way I look at it, this was an act of digital warfare, pure and simple.
At this point, I’m still undecided as to what exactly I want to do. I discovered that he violated the Terms of Service of the imageshack account used to host his pictures, and shall immediately send an email to imageshack.us to request that his account be terminated. The other web service he seems to be using is based in Turkey, so is unlikely to respond to my requests (in English instead of Turkish) to shut off his account there as well. However, I will be going through my site records and attempting to track Mr. Xoron down. What he did was illegal in this country, and I’m very curious to see if the Department of Justice would be interested in the matter.
In any event: let this be a lesson to you. If you have a blog, keep your security high. I consider myself to be rather a moderate (as far as American politics go), and I know that many people have far more extreme views than I do. You may be a target, but refuse to be a victim.
UPDATE 4/26/06 9.05PM: Turns out the hack was more sophisticated than I had thought.