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Anti-Israel Hackers Target Blogs

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Jan 9, 2009, News Report

Following Israel's strike on Gaza, a pro-Islamic group hijacked blogs like Craftmarketer.com's, locking out the owners and replacing the home pages with anti-Israel and anti-U.S. messages. It appears the hackers gained control of the blogs through their background themes, available freely online.

The group claiming responsibility for the hacking at Craftmarketer.com call themselves Team Rabat Sale and say they are doing this for the kids of Gaza. The hacked blogs link to a YouTube video.

James Dillehay, who operates Craftmarketer.com and other sites, saw two of his seven blogs taken over, both of which were running with a theme called Vigilance. He doesn't think he was singled out as a target because his remaining blogs operating with other themes have been unaffected by the attack.

Part of the hacker's message included their supposed e-mail addresses. The e-mails are most likely a trap for the unsuspecting, designed as a way to gain access to the user's computer.

"I woke up this morning ready to write a post on my blog and there on my blog home page was a notice that my site had been hijacked and was now under the control of religious extremists," reports Dillehay.

"One solution would have been to just delete the entire blog and start over. But if I had done that, I would have lost more than 250 posts. The problem was that I was locked out of the admin area where I could make any kind of changes. I did some research and learned how to gain entrance through a back door to get inside the critical areas of my site," says the author.

"Within about half an hour, I was in control again," says Dillehay. "I immediately blogged an article on 'what to do if your blog gets hacked' outlining the steps I took, so other affected bloggers could recover their content. Shortly after I booted out the hackers, I received a threatening email from a false address. I can't prove the email threat was from the hackers, but I imagine I ticked someone off."

WH

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