Sometimes hacking is done for pure fun, The Cartoon Network is an American pay television channel. The channel primarily broadcasts animated television series, mostly children’s programming, ranging from action to animated comedy. As of January 2016, Cartoon Network was available to approximately 94 million households.
During May 2019, Hackers were able to perform a successful attack against the network web servers and change the content of the web pages.
The two hackers that did that were so proud they chose to share some of the details with other twitter users. they said they are coming from Brazil and that they took advantage of a security bug in the network content management system in order to replace videos of popular cartoon shows on the web site with videos of Brazilian hip-hop songs, and videos of Ricardo Milos, a well-known Brazilian male stripper who has become an internet meme.
It took 3 days till the network discovered the incident and the web defacements were removed.
two offices of the network released short statements confirming partly the hack happened thats while the attack affected users in more than 10 different countries around the world.
Web site defacements is a very popular attack that hackers are using, usually to convey a political message or to protest a specific subject.
Everyday there are thousands of web sites being hacked and defaced that could have been easily be protected just by keeping the software updated.
Today there are many solutions, some of them are even free, that can provide automatic reliable security against the common cyber attacks that responsible for most of the web defacements. this specific attack was made by kids or teenagers who wanted to add fame to thier names as hackers and they explained that their main motivation for hacking other web sites is fun.
Romania is located in Eastern Europe, comparing to other countries around , the Romanian governments in the recent years have been investing and trying to keep the country cyber security in good shape by implementing professional teams at the different security services with defined goals.
SRI is the organization in charge on the cyber security in Romania using a unit called cyberint which is the spearhead of handling cyber incidents of the goverment, this unit as other units such as the Romanian Cert have excellent professional people working behind the scenes making sure to keep the country safe unrelated to the political events that are happening around them.
In June, SRI announced that four different hospitals have been hit by a ransomware, causing damage and disrupting some operations.
thats the second time it happened for the health sector in Romania, the first time was 2 years ago, Romanian hospital got hit by a ransomware attack which ended up with the Hospital paying thousands of dollars to release the computers.
In its statement after examining the attack SRI said: “The preliminary analysis shows that installing a recognized antivirus product was enough to stop the ransomware. “
The Health minister tried to explain to the press saying the attack wasnt very dangerous and the systems are secured.
by providing this incident such high profile and by revealing so many details by the health minister, every hacker in the world now knows that Romania healthcare industry is completely exposed to cyber attacks and they dont even meet the minimum security standards of cyber security such as having anti viruses installed.
This is very surprising behaviour as it is expected from countries with such advanced cyber capabilities to be able to implement procedures to make sure the healthcare segment is secured and most important educate about cyber security.
That’s it for this podcast, stay safe and see you in the next podcast.
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