Systems administrators were quickly able to disable the hack and restore access to the site. The attack is believed to be part of a larger internet war which exploded in cyberspace recently and appears somehow connected to the ongoing situation in Gaza. There are reports of hacker attacks around the world against sites with content about the war.

The Los Angeles Independent Media Center is sorry for any inconvenience caused by the disruption of our service to the local community. Most of the site’s features are now functioning normally but we are still experiencing some difficulties related to the hack. We hope you understand and we thank you for your patience.


LA Indymedia Collective

Israel hates the truth more than anything.

Más que todo, odia Israel la verdad.

If not, someone should report it. This does violate state and federal laws.

The FBI does have people to investigate these incidents. A complaint might give them something worthwhile to do.

I doubt the FBI would care. Your website would have to be msnbc or cnn.com or one of the Fortune 500 for them to care.

The hackers had broken in some time ago and left some backdoor scripts in weird places and we hadn't done a good enough job to remove all of them.

The attacks appear to have originated from Turkey. They went after a bunch of sites. I believe their main motivation was to go after an American site. (The message is anti-Israel.)

Also, it appears these attackers were also a "search engine optimization" company that was trying to get some commercial sites, like Viagra ads, a higher ranking in Google. The script they were using was of Russian origin and associated with a Russian SEO company.

This appears to be the current state of the net, where front companies offering "email marketing" and "search engine optimization" hire groups of system attackers to take over websites and computers to carry out their marketing operations.

They're the ethical equivalent of those companies that hire people to wheatpaste the neighborhood with those flyposters put up on construction barriers.

I meant they were the ethical equivalent of the companies that do the wheatpasting of advertisements.

The attack was like a descent into politics. It's like, if the company decides they don't like one of the buildings that they were vandalizing, and then really vandalized them.

Here's a better analogy: they were Turkish "ad taggers" putting their illegal advertising on the side wall of an Armenian-American cultural center building... and then decided in retribution for Gaza, they went and smashed the windows and sprayed political stuff about Israel on the front wall. Never mind that the people running the center were critical of the US relationship with Israel, and were sympathetic to Gazans.

Henry:

Here are some links for background information as to why
Indymedia will probably not be contacting the FBI regarding this hack.


http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/7716

http://www.eff.org/cases/indymedia-server-takedown

http://cryptome.org/fbi-imc/fbi-imc-doc.htm

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/pressclips/archives/2004/10/indymedia_is_tu.php

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2004/Indymedia-834.htm

to the link to a Turkish-language porn site that was on the front page of this site for several weeks, apparently unnoticed by the staff.

There's been a rising tide of comment spam for Turkish sites on blogs for some time now; some of the blogs on the ScienceBlogs site are regularly spammed with links to Turkish Web sites. Since scattershot spamming of links onto sites that are mostly read by an English-speaking audience seems a poor way of attracting business to sites written in an entirely different language, the only hypothesis I have is that the purpose is something similar to Googlebombing- trying to raise a site's search engine ranking by distributing references to it indiscriminately.