Tracking Website Defacers with HTTP Referers

Published: 2017-04-07. Last Updated: 2017-04-07 06:30:32 UTC
by Xavier Mertens (Version: 1)

In a previous diary, I explained how pictures may affect your website reputation[1]. Although a suggested recommendation was to prevent cross-linking by using the HTTP referer, this is a control that I do not implement on my personal blog, purely for research purposes. And it successfully worked!

My website and all its components are constantly monitored but I’m also monitoring online services like pastebin.com to track references to my domains, IP addresses and other interesting information. A few days ago, I received an alert about a mention to my blog[2]. It contained some HTML code used to deface websites:

<html lang="en-US"><head><title>Indonesian-Defacer</title>
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="https://blog.rootshell.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/blackhat-nl.png">
<meta property="og:title" content="nginxDEX">
<meta property="description" content="Jemb4t">
<meta property="og:author" content="Jemb4t">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://i.imgur.com/F2KaExC.jpg">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
<script type="text/javascript”>
…

As you can see a group of website defacer (MagelangN00bs[3]) is using a direct link to an image on my blog as favicon[4] file. I think that they used my image because it looks like the Indonesian flag with a "black hat" head on top of it:

Here is an example of defaced website by this group:

Well, nothing fancy, just a logo, some nasty music... Let's have a look at my logs and search for references to the original pictures. The group started its activity around the 15th of March: