Hacker has field day

2003-05-04 22:13

Carel van Dyk

Cape Town - A cyber hacker wreacked havoc on Friday morning when he crashed more than 50 South African websites in half-an-hour.

F3PN set a new South African "record" when he struck 53 websites in the .co.za domain between 08:30 and 09:00 on Friday morning.

Reinhardt Buys, an internet legal expert, said there has never been a cyber attack on such a scale in South Africa before. The previous record was 26 websites on a single day.

All 53 websites that came under attack are supported by the Linux operating system and were carried on the same server.

Buys said it seems as if the cyber hacker infiltrated the server and then attacked the websites.

The sites were under the management of a Pretoria based company, Vukanet.

"Our records show that he is not a very active hacker and that he normally attacks two or three websites per week," Buys said.

"However, F3PN crashed 42 websites in Germany on March 15. All those websites ran on Microsoft Windows 2000."

Although cyber hackers normally attack any website, it seems as if F3PN focuses on sites based in South Africa, Germany and Greece.

Buys said internet searches revealed that the hacker might be based in Brazil where cyber hacking is not yet illegal.

Apart from the latest attack, about 16 other South African websites have come under attack from hackers in the past two months.

Buys said the messages left behind by cyber hackers have become increasingly politicised since the Gulf War.

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