By James Middleton, UK.internet.com
The year 2000 saw Windows NT steaming ahead yet again as the
most hacked web server operating system, after a majority of
defaced pages were found to be sitting on compromised NT boxes. As
NT is one of the most popular options for web servers, it appears
that it is attacked most, however a number of companies running web
sites on variations of Linux also suffered the embarrassment of
defacement.
Defaced web page aggregation service, Attrition.org, provided
the statistics. The site maintains snapshots of any pages that are
reported to be hacked and is usually the first port of call for any
hacker who has just defaced a web site. According to the research
carried out between August 1999 and the present day, Windows NT was
running on 56 per cent of compromised web servers. Although none of
the other operating systems even came close to these figures,
perhaps surprisingly, unknown distributions of Linux took second
place with 12 per cent of the compromises.
Red Hat Linux, also took 7 per cent of the defacements, doing
slightly better than Solaris, which accounted for 8 per cent of
compromises. Windows 2000, was down nearer the bottom of the list,
only suffering 2 per cent of the successful hacking attempts. More
obscure distributions of Linux such as Debian and Slackware, along
with MacOS and BSD were lower down the list, with Power BSD and
MacOSX powered web servers only being hacked on one occasion.
The full table can be seen here.