Consumer Product Safety Commission site defaced

Hacker vows 'bombs for bourgeois' in attacks

In this story: Dozens of defacements What's the connection? RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Richard Stenger
CNN

(CNN) -- A hacker posting cryptic threats in Portuguese defaced a major U.S. government Web site over the weekend, one of many such attacks attributed to the same assailant in recent weeks.

The self-identified "COBR4S" infiltrated the Internet site of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission on Sunday and posted the following message, according the commission.

"O dia passará, a aurora chegará E a cada burguês sua bomba receberá HACKED BY C0BR4S."

	MESSAGE BOARD
Security on the Net

The rough translation into English: "The day will pass, the dawn will arrive and each bourgeois will receive their bomb."

CPSC spokeswoman Jane Francis said on Monday that the defaced page was posted on Sunday at 6 a.m. EDT and taken down within six hours.

"We have a firewall that has prevented hacks in the past. Obviously it didn't work here. We're now working on a patch to prevent more attacks," Francis said.

The commission notified the Federal Computer Incident Response Center about the attack.

"We don't have any leads on where this came from or who it is," Francis said.

Dozens of defacements

But someone using the same name as the attacker already defaced more than 100 sites in little more than a month, according an informal international archive of hack incidents.

The assailant struck a variety of public and private Web sites across the world, but tended to target government agency addresses, according to the German site alldas.de.

Like the most recent onslaught, attacks attributed to COBR4S usually involve defacing victim sites with a brief statement on a simple text page. Besides using the above phrase, the person sprinkled in references to Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara and sometimes used expletives to refer to government agencies or Canadians.

Other COBR4S-disfigured pages offered greetings to the Supreme Entity, the Silver Lords, the Prime Suspectz and other prolific hackers listed on alldas.de.

Defacing some sites with a more complex page, COBR4S writes: "Admin you sux. This we(b) site have no security. Next time be more careful. Ahahaahhaahha."

What's the connection?

COBR4S includes thanks and links to Insecure Network and Hackers.br, Portuguese-language Web sites in Brazil that deal with hacking news.

The CPSC incident came days after a congressional study reported that hackers in 2000 temporarily took over 155 federal systems, including some with sensitive research information or personal data on people in the United States.

Only 5 to 10 percent of federal agencies use automatic security detection systems, according to Tom Noonan, president of Internet Security Systems.

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