Harvard site back online after "sophisticated" defacement
The home page of Harvard University is functioning normally after it was defaced Monday morning by activists in support of the embattled regime in Syria.
"We took down the site for several hours in order to restore it," a statement from the Cambridge, Mass. college said. "The attack appears to have been the work of a sophisticated individual or group." But considering defacements have been commonplace on the web for more than a decade, some experts questioned whether the attack could be considered advanced.
"Adjectives like 'sophisticated' are always relative to the people looking at it," Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, told SCMagazineUS.com on Tuesday. "Defacements have been around for 15 years. You don't use your most sophisticated, coolest stuff to deface Harvard's web page. If [the cause] was an unpatched web server, I'm not calling that sophisticated."
