Website defacement

We've all seen the news stories: "Large Company X was yesterday hacked and their homepage was replaced with an obscene message". This sort of thing is an everyday occurrence on the Internet.

After the company SCO initiated a lawsuit against Linux vendors citing copyright violations in the Linux source code, the SCO corporate website was hacked and an image was altered to read WE OWN ALL YOUR CODE—pay us all your money. The hack was subtle enough that the casual visitor to the SCO site would likely not be able to tell that this was not the official version of the homepage:

The above image shows what the SCO homepage looked like after being defaced—quite subtle, don't you think?

Preventing website defacement is important for a business for several reasons:

• Potential customers will turn away when they see the hacked site

• There will be an obvious loss of revenue if the site is used for any sort of e-commerce sales

• Bad publicity will tarnish the company's reputation

Defacement of...