A group calling itself the Middle East Cyber Army claiming to have connections with Islamic extremists left its calling card on the homepage of the Terrasse-Vaudreuil’s website in Île-Perrot this week, but it was just one of many hit-and-miss hacks without teeth.
The message left on the website’s home page said the group works for Allah, and that Islam “always will dominate.”
It is highly doubted the hack was anything more than the result of a random search for web servers with lower security requirements.
It was probably a search on a search engine, that came up with a specific version of a web server or specific code inside someone’s website. Once that happens the group or person could have launched a script and tried to compromise “hundreds of thousands” of websites in one swoop.
“They did a search, saw all these vulnerable websites, and thought ‘let’s go deface everybody and try to get our name out there,’ ” said Terry Cutler, who founded Montreal-based IT security firm Digital Locksmiths.
It’s a problem, he said, that plagues small businesses and municipalities alike: thinking they’re too small to be the target of an attack, he told the Montreal Gazette.
“It’s what we hear 99 percent of the time,” he said.
“Even if Terrasse-Vaudreuil wasn’t targeted specifically, it can still look bad to the public.”
See more of Terry Cutler’s opinion on CTV News
See more of Terry Cutler’s opinion on CBC news
See more of Terry Cutler’s opinion on Global News Montreal
- Hit and Miss attack
- Retaliation for Charlie Hebdo cartoon
- Hacker Group claims to work for Allah and that Islam “will always dominate”
- Group claims to be the Middle East Cyber Army, makes reference to the Quran
- Used hashtag #OPFRANCE
- May have been a random attack
- group was probably seeking the low hanging fruit and of script kiddie level of computer skills
- The goal was to deface a website and gain notoriety and spread a message
