UN Website defaced

It seems that a group of hackers from Turkey defaced the official UN website Sunday morning. They posted some random text attacking the US and Israel.

The interesting thing about the hack is that it was accomplished using a known and widely disseminated exploit. One that has been around for years. The hack is known as an SQL injection exploit and is accomplished by getting the database to execute SQL code out of input forms.

The vulnerability is easily countered, and these days is seldom found on a large and prominent website. So it is very surprising that an organization as big and important as the UN, would have it's website vulnerable to an attack like this.

Check out the story at BBC: UN's website breached by hackers, and for more detail at Hackademix: United Nations VS SQL Injections

Hackers attempt to steal $450,000 from City treasury

It seems that a group of hackers attempted to steal $450,000 from the city treasury of Carson California. Hackers were able to install a key logger onto the computer of the city treasurer. Every time she logged into her laptop, all her keystrokes were logged and sent to the thieves. The thieves then attempted to have money wired from the treasury accounts to accounts in North Carolina and Michigan. The treasurer happened to notice the wire transfers and froze the money before it could be stolen. The scary thing is that she admits that if the money transfers had been smaller, she never would have caught them.
I can understand why she wouldn't notice the theft if the amounts were small. But it seems like the key logger at least should have been caught much earlier. Does the city of Carson not install antivirus and spyware protection on their computers? Who do they have on staff for IT work? Obviously, he or she is not doing their job.

Story in LA Times: Computer hackers steal Carson funds
Via Slashdot: City Almost Loses 450K to Keylogger