"How Noob Website Hackers Can Become Persistent Threats"

Two university researchers suggest that tracking the early activities of hackers using open-source intelligence can provide major hints about the potential of them becoming a persistent threat in the future. They emphasized that this information can lead early intervention attempts to steer hackers away from illegal paths. Christian Howell, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida, and David Maimon, professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University, recently tracked 241 new hackers involved in website defacements over a one-year period. Howell and Maimon identified new hackers for their study based on information submitted on Zone-H, a platform commonly used by malicious actors to report website defacements. Hackers upload evidence of their attack, including their moniker, the domain name of the defaced website, and an image of the defaced content. Once administrators verify the content, they upload it to the archive, where it is accessible to the public. Zone-H keeps track of more than 15 million attacks that have resulted in website defacements throughout the years. This article continues to discuss findings from the academic study of website defacement behavior. 

Dark Reading reports "How Noob Website Hackers Can Become Persistent Threats"