Latvian hack's hack story leads to hack-hacking

An enraged Latvian hacker went batshit over an article criticising security at small, low-cost hosting companies and defaced the website of the news agency LETA. The hacker used sophisticated techniques to fight off efforts to restore service to hundreds of the news agency's customers. LETA, which is privately owned, calls …

[Tony Barnes]

How fast?

Damn, Latvia's got it good on the 'net speed front!

[jake]

"hundreds"? That many? Wow!

4ll f34r teh 1337 ha><or'5 mad 5killz!!!!!1!!!one!!11eleven!1!

Or, maybe I should just yawn and get back to important things like coffee and spring lambs and the very pregnant Belted Galloways ...

[mark 63]

batshit

"An enraged Latvian hacker went batshit ....."

i like the intro :) pro journo at its best

[Filippo]

Who hosts LETA?

If it's a small hosting company, then the hacker just proved their point for them. And if it's a large hosting company - well, we'd like to know who it is.

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Looks like they host their own stuff

The IPs they used are registered to their ISP lattelecom, I am willing to bet that their website is hosted on their own Kit. Although it looks like it may also be hosted by the ISP itself.

[Steve Evans]

Re: Looks like they host their own stuff

Hell yeah, if you had 100-500Mb/s coming into your building, would you bother using a hosting company?

Well if you have any sense you would... but people don't see that, they think, yeah, that's fast enough. They don't stop to think about what else a good hosting company does like firewalls, IDS, OS/DB and application patches etc etc.

[sisk]

100-500Mb/s???

Damn....I'm paying out the arse for 12Mb/s...And that's the fastest I can get here.

[Hckr]

Some facts, so you are not mislead.

1st. Why is here this stupid Lattelecom advertising? That great fiber-optics internet is accessible only in urban areas, houses with more that 3floors and 10 flats. And not all of them either. As soon as you need internet couple of meters further down the street - it costs many thousands of lats.

2nd. Leta have their "servers" at their office. They received a warning from me last year. They ignored it. They have expensive managable switches, but everything is in 1 big LAN subnet. Wireless too. With WEP security on their great Linksys craps. And an open socks proxy. And some of those servers were accessible from LAN without a password. Do I need to explain more?

BTW, they pay salary to 2 or 3 "admins".

P.S. Curently the site isn't working.

[damncrow]

From a resident...

Those 100 to 500 Mb/s speeds are a wide overstatement. Available mostly in Riga (well, that is nearly a half of population), BUT even then only in selected (that would be: profitable) microdistricts. AND it's available only for non-commercial purposes.

And an IT advanced country? Oh please... Exigen got itself into scandal for delivering buggy system to government; it cost millions, only damn lack of laws against IT crime and corruption prevented Exigen from being sued.

Most internet startups are something like mayflies - they last not more than a year.

Because there's a chronic deficiency of qualified specialists in any of IT areas. I may be nonpatriotic with this anti-advertising, but the BS has to stop.