Hacking competition announces winner

The organisers of last weekend's hacking competition have declared a team from Brazil as the winner.

The results were posted on Defacers-challenge.com, showing Brazilian defacement crew 'Perect.br' as the clear winner with 152 points, more than double that of its nearest rival.

But the Zone-H website, which keeps a record of hacking attacks and inadvertently found itself as the scorekeeper of the competition, criticised media interest in the challenge.

"Nothing would have happened if the media didn't pay so much attention, turning a non-case into something useful to fill the empty summer newspapers," said the website.

Zone-H was in no way involved in the competition; the organisers simply decided to use the website's defacement archive as a scoreboard.

But some hackers performed a denial of service attack against Zone-H in a bid to sabotage the contest.

Zone-H was offline for longer than expected because the site couldn't handle the flood of traffic generated by the news reports that linked to it.

Despite being labelled as the "messiest day in internet history", the contest proved to be a damp squib. Only a few thousand websites were attacked, marginally more than the daily average.

But the high profile of the event meant that webmasters were on their toes over the weekend.

"A good word from our side to all those security companies that issued an alert. A bad word to all those who underestimated the case. It's better to be warned than to be hacked, right?" said Zone-H.