Russians hack Aussie web site

AN OBSCURE Australian film production company site - 2 Feet Films - became the unlikely victim of Russian hackers. The site was forced to close for four days to fix the problem.

The site's owner, Phil Rich, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the first he'd heard of the attack was when his ISP, Pacific Internet, phoned to inform him they had taken down his site.

Buried deep in the code on one of the web pages was a URL containing suspicious Unix commands that pointed to a mysterious Russian website.

The code was designed to attempt to gain access to Pacific's own web servers, and although the company's security software was able to detect and repel the attack, they still shut down 2 Feet's site as a precaution.

Pacific Internet say that attacks on its clients' sites are more common than most people might think. It took Rich's web site designer four days to fix the site's vulnerabilities during which time 2 Feet Films had to be offline.

The site features a number of dynamic features to make its film products look impressive which is why it uses custom software. The Russian hackers must have spotted this and planted their own code manually rather than via a worm or Trojan.

So if you've got your own code site, it might be worth upping site security. µ

More at the Sydney Morning Herald . µ

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