Website defacement (defacementis a cyber attack which consists of changing the appearance of a website, usually its home page, without authorisation.
The aim is often to replace legitimate content with a message, image or video that is political, ideological, humorous or purely vandalistic.
🎯 Objectives
This is a a form of digital vandalism for various reasons such as :
- Political or ideological statement : disseminate propaganda messages, political slogans or opinions. It's a form of "hacktivism".
- Claiming technical skills : For some hackers, defacement is a way of demonstrating their technical expertise and gaining notoriety within the hacker community.
- Religious claims Some groups may deface sites to display religious messages or express their faith.
- Humour or trolling Attacks may be carried out with the sole aim of provoking or ridiculing the site owner.
- Humiliating the target: damage the reputation of an organisation, company or individual by posting embarrassing, insulting or degrading content.
- Pure vandalism: sometimes there is no clear ideological motivation, just the desire to cause damage and disruption.
- Distraction or preamble to other attacks : defacement can serve as a diversion while the attacker carries out more discreet actions, such as exfiltrating data or installing malicious software.
👉 Examples
- Replacing the home page with a political or religious message : a government website suddenly displaying an anti-government slogan, or a company website displaying a message of support for a specific cause.
- Display of shocking or inappropriate images or videos : an educational website showing offensive images or an online sales site displaying inappropriate humorous content.
- Redirection to another website : a legitimate website which, once defaced, redirects users to a malicious or propaganda site.
- Alteration of the textual content of the site : modifying blog posts, product descriptions or "about" information to insert unwanted messages or false information.
- Addition of discreet malicious code : although less visible, some disfigurements can include theinjection malicious JavaScript code to compromise site visitors (for example, by trying to steal their identifiers or by installing malicious software on their computers).
💥 Consequences
- Damage to the image and credibility of the victim organisation
- Potential loss of revenue and productivity
- Exposure of major security vulnerabilities
Site disfiguration is above all a damage to image and credibility. However, it can be a sign of deeper security flaws and can have significant indirect consequences.
💉 Protection and remedies
🛡 Preventive measures
- Regularly and systematically apply security updates to the operating system and software installed on your servers
- Having a firewall correctly set
- Check event logs regularly
- Check that passwords are sufficiently complex and changed regularly
- Make users aware that they should never pass on administrator access and authentication details to an unidentified third party
- Do not keep an accessible list of the names of people with administrator rights on the server
💉 Remedies if you are a victim of disfigurement
- Disconnect from the Internet the machine concerned and alert your hosting provider
- Recovering log files your firewall, proxy server and affected servers
- Make a complete copy (physical copy) of the machine under attack
- Identify sensitive elements which may have been copied or destroyed
- Notify the CNIL of this incident if there has been a breach of personal data.
- Identify the source of the intrusion and take the necessary steps to ensure that it does not happen again
- Making a complaint to the police station or gendarmerie, or by writing to your local public prosecutor, providing all the evidence in your possession.
- Correct security breaches and change all passwords once you have regained control of the affected machine
📊 Figures and trends
- Website defacement remains a persistent threat, although the attacks are often less sophisticated than other forms of cyber-attack.
- Websites using popular content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress are often targeted because of their vulnerabilities or obsolete plugins.
- The motivations behind the disfigurements vary, but political and ideological motivations have been on the increase in recent years.
- In France, Articles 323-1 et seq. of the French Criminal Code stipulate that "fraudulently extracting, holding, reproducing, transmitting, deleting or modifying data (...)" contained in an automated data processing system (STAD) is punishable by 2 to 7 years' imprisonment and a fine of €60,000 to €300,000, depending on the case.
