Slovak police seize IT company Websupport's servers

Slovak police raided the offices and seized ten web servers of the IT company Websupport on June 27. According to the Sme daily, the company hosts the websites of 3,500 clients, or almost three percent of the Slovak internet. Clients were left without internet connections and were unable to send or receive emails. Losses were reported particularly by online shopping sites.

The order came from the Special Prosecution branch as part of the final phase of an investigation into hackers' attacks on the National Security Bureau's (NBÚ) network in April 2006. The police hope to find some evidence of the attacks on the servers.

The company has protested the police action and announced on its webpage that it does not know the reasons behind the police raid. The company wrote that it considers it to be unbelievable that police have seized servers of a commercial web-hosting company without warning. The company had still not resumed normal operations by midday on June 28.

The hackers who broke into the NBÚ computer system copied information from email and internet access servers. The NBÚ, however, said that the hackers were unable to access classified information that cannot be sent by email. The media reported that the hackers copied about 36,000 emails that had been on the NBÚ email server since February 2006.

The hackers described their exploit on the blackhole.sk website on April 25, 2006 in an article entitled National Security Bureau Pwn3d. They took advantage of a hole in the Bureau's webmail program to find a list of the server's user accounts, one of which was named "nbusr". They tried to log in as user nbusr using the password nbusr123, and were surprised when they gained access to the system on the first try.

Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.

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