Crackers sabotage Defacers' Challenge

This weekend's heavily hyped Defacers' Challenge turned into a damp squib, but it has caused ructions in the industry with claims that security specialists talked-up the event.

Although it is not yet evident how much damage has been caused by a weekend of predicted web page vandalism, even hackers appear to be split in their opinion of the competition.

The challenge suffered a setback over the weekend as an unidentified vigilante group attacked the website that was to be used to tally the vandals' scores.

A message appeared on Defacers-Challenge.com revealing that independent defacement directory site Zone-H.org had been knocked offline by a sustained denial of service attack.

Although it was not involved directly in the competition, the Zone-H site was still unavailable this morning.

But the organisers of the competition remained unfazed and simply published a new defacement mirror based on Zone-H technology, and extended the competition end time from 3.00pm Sunday to midnight Sunday.

The organisers made an announcement on the challenge website, which we quote here verbatim:

"Hello again brothers, I had to made a little change in rules because website that will use to notify the defacements its under a ddos attack.

"Now, the challenge will be until 00:00 hours, finish in 7 july. To be possible all defacers notify yours defacements was created a new mirror."

Results are set to be unveiled tomorrow and will give some indication of the damage caused and whether the disruptions were successful.

But a war of words has already broken out between security professionals over the pre-competition hype and whether the challenge was ever a significant threat.

"This is the Chicken Little syndrome," said Jay Heiser, an analyst at TruSecure.

"The contest seems to have been one person's idea and never really caught the imagination of the hacking community.

"The wider community wouldn't have known that the competition was on if the publicity machines of some companies hadn't swung into action."

Both the US Office of Homeland Security and security company ISS released warnings about the hacker challenge on Friday.

At the time, ISS urged organisations to "remain vigilant and review security policies to ensure that critical security issues have been addressed, especially on outward facing web servers".