Canadian nuclear safety site defaced by hacker

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is investigating how its Web site was broken into.

Reuters

Feb. 8, 2007 12:31 p.m. PT

Red-faced officials at Canada's nuclear safety watchdog on Thursday said they were probing how a hacker had managed to litter its official Web site with dozens of colour photographs of a nuclear explosion.

The Ottawa Citizen newspaper said every media release on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's Web site had been labelled as a security breach on Wednesday. When opened, each document had a headline reading "For immediate release" and underneath was a large photo of an exploding atomic bomb.

"We are in discussions with the (Internet service) provider. When we were informed the Web site had been tampered with, we immediately disabled the media module," said commission spokesman Aurel Gervais, dismissing the suggestion that the hacker had been able to access secret information.

"The external Web site was the only Web site that was tampered with. There was no internal information that was compromised," he said.

The media site at http://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/media/ was working normally on Thursday.

The Citizen--which published a color photograph of one of the tampered pages--said the hacker had left a message saying "Please dont (sic) put me in jail...oops, I divided by zero."