Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Linux is highly vulnerable to hacking!

This is what Senior Supt. Gilbert C. Sosa, chief of the Anti-Transnational Crime Division of the Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group said when asked about Philippine government websites getting hacked:

“Further, these top hackers have targeted the national and local websites of the PIDS, DOST, DOLE, Napolcom, Supreme Court and Department of Education which are using the Linux Operating System, a free and openly available software which makes them highly vulnerable to hacking,” he said.


No wonder these sites get hacked - he does not have a clue what he is talking about and to think that he works for the government! First, it is the website that got hack -- runs on a software that runs on top of Linux, the operating system! Second, if it were Apache, then I am sure that they are not using the latest version with the latest patches!

What these incidents just prove is the fact that these government agencies do not know anything about securing their sites. And what is even worse is that among the defaced sites, the Department of Science and Technology is one of them -- the parent agency of the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI). I know brilliant folks at ASTI and I am sure that somehow and somewhere down the line, they were not able to make full of use of their expertise and provide assistance to their mother agency. As for the other agencies, I am not surprised - knowing that most of them do not have the technical competency to ensure that their systems are kept secure. It is one thing to secure a personal site but a government site with PAID people? C'mon! Where the hell is that unit that was inaugurated not too long ago - it was supposed to prevent these things from happening to gov't agencies?

1 comment:

Antonov Dominikski Krusov said...

Maybe Microsoft paid him to say that! :))