New Zealand Herald “Pwned” by NZ Hackers

The New Zealand Herald’s website fell victim to a page spoofing stunt earlier today, by hackers wanting to publicise their upcoming Kiwicon security conference in November.

clipped from www.stuff.co.nz “Metlstorm”, one of the organisers of Kiwicon Wellington, says it’s comparable to taping a fake article into a printed copy of the Herald, before giving the paper to a reader. The bogus article was marked clearly as “a joke”, he says, and contains “wildly unreasonable comment that no sane person would believe.” “After the page loads, the XSS bug is used to inject Javascript [a type of web-page programming language] that rewrites the article.” Earlier this month, the Computerworld newspaper, part of Fairfax Business Media, was spoofed in the same way by the Kiwicon hackers. The Herald’s multi-media editor Jeremy Rees described the action as a cheap visual stunt and said the people behind it had not intruded into the news sites’ system. “We received an email from the people claiming to have done it straight after. They apologised and said ‘no actual hacking of any of your kit occurred…all the stuff was cheap client side tricks’.”