Tandem’s website for Parliament video hacked

The hosting server for a Tandem Studios-produced website for New Zealand Parliament was hacked over the weekend.

Turkish Hacker – Iskorpitx – compromised a large majority of websites managed by the American-based company A2 Hosting, including Christchurch-based www.inthehouse.co.nz

It was a basic security breach with a picture and a simple post on the front page of the inthehouse website saying “best regards to all world”.

A2 Hosting says “This hack was massive across the internet and used a previously unknown vulnerability, limiting our ability in preventing it. The hack appears to have replaced files starting with index* and not to have modified anything else.”

There is a fix in place that is currently preventing this exploit from being used again and A2 Hosting is working with the CentOS community to implement a patch that will resolve the issue permanently.

Tandem director Dave Dunlay says, “There was no political intent to specifically hack the In The House site. Basically, it was a case of our site being on the wrong server at the wrong time.”

Within hours of Tandem being notified of the breach, the site was fully restored with all security back in place and the site ready for business as usual with the return of Parliament from 2pm today.

Dunlay says Tandem designed the site for the Office of the Clerk and has successfully managed it for last 12 months without any problems, including the successful running and maintenance of the site through the last two weeks since the Christchurch earthquake.

Coincidentally, Tandem was in the process of moving the site from an international-based server to a Christchurch-based hosting company, but this will take some weeks as the website holds over 4000 pages.

Inthehouse.co.nz and its YouTube channel have had close to 100,000 views and on numerous occasions inthehousenz has been on the top-ten list of most-viewed YouTube channels in New Zealand.

Parliament returns today from 2pm with all video available for viewing on demand at www.inthehouse.co.nz for sharing through social media and blog sites.

ENDS

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