Escambia School District Websites Hacked, Proclaim Love For Iran

May 26, 2011

Many of the Escambia County School District’s websites were hacked Wednesday night and replaced with a page in support of Iran and displaying an obscene gesture.

The hacker’s page proclaimed “this Website Has Been Hacked…N3td3v!l Was Here” and proclaimed “We Love Iran”. The page also included a skull and crossbones image, along with a drawing of an obscene finger gesture. To see an image of the complete page (Warning: Including the obscene gesture!), click the image on the left.

By midnight, the hacker’s page had been removed from the school district’s main pages, but it remained on the pages of several schools, including Northview High and Ernest Ward Middle, at 7 a.m. Thursday.

Pictured: A portion of the Northview High School website as seen about 12:30 Thursday morning.

Editor’s note: On the image of the hacked page, we have digitally altered the NorthEscambia.com IP address used to visit the page; the page displayed the Internet address of any computer visiting the site.

Comments

21 Responses to “Escambia School District Websites Hacked, Proclaim Love For Iran”

  1. Lyall on May 27th, 2011 7:53 pm

    From wear “Don Manderson/Escambia School District: “We’re proactive. We have a group of web technology experts and network service engineers who are constantly doing the do diligence as far as research is concerned and deploying all the things that you would expect a large website would deploy to protect itself. “

    Well Mr Manderson maybe our ideas about experts seam to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. If this happened to any of my sites/servers I sure would not think I’m a professional. I would be lucky if I still had a job.

    Everybody gets hacked. Everybody. I mean, look at Sony’s playstation network. Down for what, almost a month? That’s a hack. This is some script kiddie bot network that just owned your box(s).

  2. Don on May 27th, 2011 6:15 pm

    Sad they got in with the over paid staff they have on Pace blvd.Playing to many games online im sure fire all who was on watch that day.

  3. William on May 27th, 2011 8:29 am

    Lyall wrote “that’s why this should be really embarrassing to their IT staff. Preventing this kind of hack is easy.”

    Amen. But read this (from WEAR 3):

    Don Manderson/Escambia School District: “We’re proactive. We have a group of web technology experts and network service engineers who are constantly doing the do diligence as far as research is concerned and deploying all the things that you would expect a large website would deploy to protect itself. “

  4. Lyall on May 27th, 2011 7:13 am

    I doubt that anybody is targeting schools. Ppl just scan the Internet for live ip’s then scan the ip for open ports and know exploits. Once they find one, this kind of hack, they just dump the defaced site on it.

    As William said, a bot net can do this with no human interaction what so ever. On the Internet, everybody is local. Everybody is a target.

    On one of my mail servers, I have the subcontinent of Europe and Asia blocked do to constant spam drops and port scans.

    I could post some logs showing that my web server is bombarded with attempted attacks all day/everyday. It just the nature of the Internet. That’s why this should be really embarrassing to their IT staff. Preventing this kind of hack is easy.

  5. Anonymous on May 26th, 2011 8:42 pm

    well its finally happened. terrorist cells are now preying on schools. i knew this day would finally get here and im sorry to say no ones ready for it -.-

  6. Jim on May 26th, 2011 6:19 pm

    nudo, These people are from a different country. It has nothing to do with a senior prank.

  7. Jenn on May 26th, 2011 4:40 pm

    What’s wrong with liking Iran? It was wrong to hack the website but geez people let’s not freak over the Iran thing. Not everyone from Iran is bad. Let’s keep our minds open. :-)

  8. deBugger on May 26th, 2011 12:43 pm

    Wow.

    That’s just, like— Kah-RAYzee, dude!

    I hope these “notorious no-good malcontents” can be persuaded to use their skills & abilities FOR GOOD.

  9. QWERTY on May 26th, 2011 12:00 pm

    Sadly, it’s not really hard either. My brother (who graduated about 7 years ago) hacked into Santa Rosa county’s system and accessed his grades. He could have changed them, but he was a straight A student anyway.

  10. nudo on May 26th, 2011 11:59 am

    Probably a senior prank sense its the end of the school year.

  11. Name (required) on May 26th, 2011 9:14 am

    At the risk of stating the obvious,

    There is an email listed in the screenshot… you would be well advised
    not to waste your time sending an email to that address.

    Spammers often use ’spoofed’ emails that they know are valid in order
    to register on various forums and post links… if you send an email to
    that address your email will likely be used for other purposes.

  12. jcellop on May 26th, 2011 9:02 am

    i would not rule out that someone may be trying to manipulate American public opinion (on a small scale, of course) against the iranian/muslim position….i have my doubts that this was generated from that particular group..homegrown, or not….more likely (in my opinion) it was the brainstorm of a misguided American trying to stir-up some ire in our community against some middle eastern countries or muslims, in general…..it just sounds so juvenile.

  13. Lyall on May 26th, 2011 8:18 am

    “groups” that only deface sites like this normally just search for websites/servers with misconfigured permissions. If it had been a real hacker you would not have known anything.

    Not trying to point fingers, but this is kinda a webhosting 101 failure. And if what I remember, there is an educational price break from MS that is huge so really no excuse for 2003. Also, there is no excuse for running an unpatched server with a live IP. Might want to look into Linux. Or a new IT guy.

    What would have happened if they got farther than the webhost? Please don’t tell me that student information is on the same box. But buy the looks of it, it’s not to secure anyway.

    Computer Guy/Girl’s motto: Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

  14. 429SCJ on May 26th, 2011 8:17 am

    If thy hand offend thee!

  15. William on May 26th, 2011 7:29 am

    Don’t think they will find and punish who did this, as some commenters have suggested, or send them to Iran.

    Hacks like this are typically perpetrated by kids or young people in places like Russia or China. Infected computers become “bots” and look for other servers that are not properly updated and deface them.

    The school district is running Windows Server 2003 (yep, that’s 2003) that was probably not properly patched.

  16. justme on May 26th, 2011 7:19 am

    FATHER TIME: AMEN BROTHER! We’ll just see how much they REAAAALY do love it once they get there without a round trip ticket in hand! I hope they can figure out who did this and punish them for it!

  17. Thought on May 26th, 2011 7:16 am

    Now that schools are planning to go to computer solely in place of text books, what will happen when all the computers are infected with virus and children are exposed to bad things.

  18. luvinoki on May 26th, 2011 6:53 am

    This also happened to our church website here in Japan.

  19. George on May 26th, 2011 6:43 am

    The irony is tha hackers in Iran are routinely executed……

  20. Father Time on May 26th, 2011 6:29 am

    I have a solution to this problem, find out who did this then escort them to the nearest airport with a one way ticket to Iran with a tee shirt that reads stupid American. Problem solved

  21. huh on May 26th, 2011 3:24 am

    They could have at least posted something more entertaining than that.

Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under News