EC- Council Website of the Security Certification Group got defaced with passport of Snowden. Passports of 60,000 US military and government IT professionals at risk.
The EC-Council website http://www.eccouncil.org which is basically an international council of the E-commerce consultants has been defaced this past Sunday evening. The hacker who used the name Eugene Belford (and is known by the name “the thieving evil computer genius”) has also claimed that he has found passports of thousands of law enforcement officials while breaking into this website.
Eugene Belford on the homepage of the website wrote, “Defaced again”? With regards to the claim of the hacker that he has got access to the passport information, he posted a photo of the passport of Edward Snowden along with a letter which was send by Edward to the council in 2010.
EC-Council for many years has been the administrator of the certification of security information. The training programs of this organization are sometimes used by employers for the purpose of speeding up the skills of their employees. Different certification and programs are carried out by the council which include Certified Ethical Hacker certification, Certified Security Analyst of EC-Council certification etc.
The hacker has referred to a page with an address artrition.org where grievances have been listed against the certifier. The artrition.org page says:
- EC-Council’s history is mired in controversy, with a wide variety of criticism coming from both the education and information security professions. “The company not only runs an extensive certification program, they also operate a virtual university. This has not stopped them from taking shortcuts usually reserved for students, by plagiarizing content from other sources and including it in their commercial offerings.”
Link of targeted website along with its Zone-h mirror is available below:
http://zone-h.org/mirror/id/21830813
http://www.eccouncil.org
Well for EC-Council, this has not been the first defacement. Two security researchers have suggested that the hacker has previously gained access to the GApps.
EC-Council on its Facebook page writes that they have around 30,000 certified professionals who are now working for FBI, UR Army, IBM, United Nations and Microsoft, and they also write that they have trained about 80,000 individuals.
At the time of publishing this article, the website was hacked and displying deface page left by the hackers.
