Heavens, what are these hackers up to!

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 05 April 2009 16:38

Your IT - Home IT

A Christian writers’ website, Faithwriters.com, boasting 1.1 million unique visitors per month has apparently been hacked, with some 40,000 passwords believed to have been stolen and emails compromised, including those of hundreds of writers from Australia and New Zealand.

According to a report from Trend Micro, there is evidence that the scammers used an SQL injection attack to compromise email addresses and passwords that are now being used to access Facebook accounts and more financially oriented sites, such as banking or shopping sites like eBay, for example. 
 
David Peterson from Trend Micro Australia says the attacks follow on from one earlier this year targeting members of Christian singles website, Singles.org.

“These latest hacks are yet further evidence that users should not recycle email addresses and passwords across multiple sites.  The danger is that an easily compromised social networking site could provide hackers with a user’s login information to banking and even work accounts,” Peterson warns.
 
“If it is not feasible to use different details for each site signed up to, I would urge users to at least compartmentalise their login details; use a different email and password for social networking sites to banking and work login information” suggests Peterson.

Trend Micro says it offers a service called SecureSite which audits a website’s security and displays a certification logo if it passes and if you want more information on this follow the link to trendmicro.com.au.