Hacking Incidents Skyrocket In Malaysia - MyCert
By Adam Creed
21st March 2001 (Newsbytes)

The Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team (MyCert) has witnessed a surge in hacking incidents since the end of last year and is warning all system managers to monitor, upgrade, patch and fix their computer servers.

MyCert reports a "dramatic escalation in intrusion cases," since December 2000, particularly attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows NT and Linux computer server platforms.

The MyCert team says it's seeing such attacks each and every day, even more so on weekends and holidays when systems may not be monitored so closely.

And it's getting worse: Total hacking incidents to the middle of March 2001 by far surpassed the total number of similar incidents in February.

MyCert has its opinion on the motivation behind the attacks: "The hackers are chiding the system administrators and organizations' seriousness in managing the security of their information technology systems," the team states.

The vulnerabilities include a program in the default Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) installation that allows Web sites to be defaced, and a root account compromise on some Linux platforms that can see data wiped. According to MyCert, these vulnerabilities are easily fixed.

MyCert is on the Web at http://www.mycert.org.my .