Hacked and abused

Our website had been hacked and abused. A hacker from the Ukraine found a back-door in our spam protection. He got inside and used our server to send spam messages.

The same hacker seems to have informed other “black-hats”. We could find traces going back to Estonia, Sweden and Germany. The injected code sent mails nobody wants – mails leading to Viagra and Cialis sites.

Fortunately our website hosting company in Geneva (Switzerland) had been vigilant as they always are. They found that the communications profile of silent-gardens.com differed dramatically from our normal communication usage. After 24 hours, the hosting team put the site off-line and informed me.

A “Black Hat Hacker” is a criminal who tries to get inside computers and other electronics devices for the only purpose to make money or to destroy. A “White Hat Hacker” does the same, but his goal is to detect failures, weak points and other design and programming errors. He then informs the community and/or the manufacturer of the faulty piece of hardware or software.

In between these two extremes one can find the “Grey Hats”. These are mostly political, cultural or ideological activists. They try to diffuse their ideas and ideology through captured computers. At this very moment, the Thai army government fights against these “Grey Hats” which infiltrate most of the social medias and hack government websites. “The political battlefield is no longer confined to the streets of Bangkok. It’s moved into cyberspace,” said a government official. “This is the power of social media.”

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During the last 4 days we fortified our website and our blog. Of course, we do not tell you, what we’ve done. This would be too attractive for the hackers among our readers. but we have put some nice honey-pots among our files to catch the bad guys. And one new security item you can test by sending a comment to this article. Try it!  

[GARD]