Type the word "Iskorpitx" into Google, and see what you get. Exactly the same word spit back at you, except from any number of different sites. That's because Iskorpitx is the handle of a hacker who recently committed the biggest hacking incident in web-hosting history. Those search results are the graffiti he left.
Thought to be a 45-year-old Turkish man, Iskorpitx successfully hacked at least 21,549 sites at once (a tally is still being made-expect the final count to be much higher), defacing pages on all of them. His signature included a Turkish flag, his handle and country of origin, and several repetitions of the "f***" next to the names of France, Greece, and Armanian [sic].
As one might imagine, this has upset quite a few people. A brief glance at the list of sites Iskorpitx affected shows the domains .org, .net, and .com, indicating a probable lack of aim or distinction on his part.
Iskorpitx has quite a reputation for this sort of thing. Since 2003, he's hacked an estimated 117,000 websites, not even including this latest round, and some of those were the sites of his own country's government.
The Turkish hacker seems to have ignited some sort of passion for the activity in his country. In recent months, more than 50 percent of notified defacements appear to have originated from Turkey. Brazil was formerly the most prominent home of these sorts of hackers.
It remains unknown whether the most recent attacks where made at the root or webserver level. Iskorpitx executes his hacks by creating subpages, regardless of what authorization level he achieves on the servers.
Iskorpitx's motivations are unclear. Although many of the Turkish hackers have religious agendas, he does not seem to share them. Whatever his reasons or inspiration, Iskorpitx is acting as a massive nuisance throughout the Web.
Via Doug Caverly.
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