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Novell OpenSUSE Server Hacked
abelikoff writes "Both LinuxWorld Australia and SuSE Linux Forums report that OpenSUSE website got hacked last night." This story was submitted quite a number of times.
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I still will never understand why people do stupid things like hack websites.
How does hacking this website help to put your voice ? Other than geeks, how many people check that website. If they had hacked CNN or BBC, it would have been noticed significantly. Soon this would go into oblivion. Makes me wonder what has nuclear progam to do with open source linux ?
Linux is near-flawless in terms of security.
You don't follow security mailing lists, do you? Most Linux distros have decent security but "near-flawless"?
Trolling is a art,
You might have confused the Arabic language with the Persian language (Farsi). They share the same alphabet but are entirely different.
Looks like a fish, drives like a fish, steers like a cow.
Dear Hackers,
If you're going to hack websites, don't try to justify your idiotic hobby by turning it into a political posterboard. It has the opposite effect you're looking for. The thing that scares people most is unpredictable behavior. If Iran were calm, clear in stating there intentions, and followed all the diplomatic protocols with a smile there would be no way for anyone to stop them from builting reactors (wheather it be for processing fuel for weapons or not). But stupid stuff like this make Iranians look like evil subversives. Just look at the graphic they posted. It looks like the shadow of some kind of daemon with horns. This is not a good image for Iran.
Or if it's a different group impersonating iranians, you're just losers.
The problem comes in when you are, yourself, an OS vendor. It's really hard (from a marketing/PR perspective) to have your site run a BSD when you happen to sell a major Linux distro. Or have a major online service you bought run Solaris when you happen to make Windows, for that matter. Customers (and potential customers) will rightfully wonder why you don't have confidence in your own product.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's a little worse than that. The IHS guys aren't just script kiddies, their lead guy's blog is here. He is apparently very active in writing exploits and gives code to all of them. He was just accepted into a university, but worse, one of his blog entries is about how he likes slackware and is trying to write some code to help the project out. Now I don't know about you, but I find that suspicious as hell. Unless someone goes over every line of code submitted with a magnifying glass than it can be fairly easy to sneak in a little area for a buffer overflow or something. (Preventive measures like SELinux and exec-shield are necessary and even they don't fully solve the problem). I can only hope that the slackware community does decent background checks on submitters, and also good code checking. The last thing we need is for Open Source to start being purposely made vulnerable and attacked from within.
Regards,
Steve