Independent Aussie News Site Crikey Hacked, Intruder Leaves Delightful Message

It must be some sort of holy month for hackers. NVIDIA, Yahoo and Phandroid are all licking their wounds after hackers decided to crack open their internet insides and take a peek. Now, Aussie news site Crikey is inspecting its injuries after hackers breached its security earlier this morning.

Update (1.11pm): Crikey editor Jason Whittaker has told The Age that “anyone who logged on to Crikey before the problem was resolved could expose their computer to a virus.”

Update (11.50am): Seems Crikey is back to its regular self.


I first noticed something amiss when the entries in Crikey’s RSS feed all started coming though with “hacked by caho v_helsing@mail.ru” in their titles. When I tried visiting the site, Chrome simply timed out.

Mumbrella, on the other hand, managed to capture the above image before the site started serving an error 500 page. While of questionable English, it gets the message across, with the hacker happy enough to leave his or her email address in case anyone felt like getting in touch.

Crikey posted on its Facebook page about the breach, warning users to keep their distance until its administrators can figure out what happened. There’s no word yet on whether subscriber details were accessed.

While you can take all the steps necessary to lock down a site, the likes of Sony, LinkedIn and countless others in recent times have shown us that if a hacker wants to take you down, they’ll find a way in. Let’s hope Crikey gets back up and running soon and in a better position to shed light on the breach.

[Mumbrella]

Image: Mumbrella


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