A number of the 260 local Web sites that were hacked over the weekend were hosted by Internet service provider (ISP) Gamco, but it will not admit to a security breach.
Sites that were allegedly hacked and defaced on Saturday include www.imandi.co.za, www.italianalbums.co.za, www.adventurecenter.co.za and www.corporateimage.co.za, all of which are hosted on a Gamco server based in Johannesburg.
None of the sites, however, now show any signs of the attack that allegedly left the message: "Team anti-USA ===>anti-Terrorisme ====> anti-Israel ====> Our Msg iS for USA & ISRAEL are TERRORISTS, people in Iraq & Palestine are dying everyday, children are losing their parents, losing their lifes, what`s going on?! Move on people! Move on and do something, your turn we`ll come, are you still keeping it quite?"
E-law firm Buys Inc says a Moroccan hacker group calling itself "Team-evil" attacked the largest number of local sites on the afternoon of Saturday, 8 January.
Gamco director Sean Bezuidenhout will not admit to any security breach or any form of event happening on one of his company`s servers.
"I don`t have the full information at hand right now. However, just like any other ISP, we do have security issues that we attend to," he says.
Also on the afternoon of 8 January, and seemingly unrelated to the activities of "Team-evil", a hacker referred to as "Batistuda" successfully hacked into 11 other local Web sites. However, it is not known if Gamco also hosted these sites.
According to the Zone-H Internet Thermometer, 289 single Internet Protocol defacements and 1 044 mass defacements took place on the same day internationally.
Of these, 58% occurred on Windows 2000 systems, 25% on Linux systems and 13% on Windows 2003 systems.
"Although hacking is a statutory crime in SA that may result in high fines and imprisonment of up to five years, it is very difficult to act against hackers operating from foreign countries," says Reinhardt Buys, who heads up Buys Inc.
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