I know that unixmen is not the best place to write and share news about defaced pages, but this one is very important and I think it deserves some attention from the unixmen readers. You know that Google has local domains for every country in the world, such as www.google.it, www.google.de etc. One of this local domains is www.google.ps which is the Google local domain for the Palestine country. If you type this domain on your address bar right now everything works and looks well, but it did not looked so a few days ago. Why?
Four black hat hackers from Palestine, Cold Z3ro, Haml3t, Sas and Dr@g defaced the google.ps webpage. What about the message, did they leave any message in the defaced webpage? Yes, the reason why they defaced the google.ps webpage was to be heard from Google and the rest of the world. In case you didn’t know Palestine country is in a ongoing conflict with Israel, a conflict that began in the mid 20th century. Now i think you are curious to know what message did this guys leave, so keep reading this article and the message shown below in quotation marks.
“Uncle google we say hi from Palestine to remember you that the country in Google map not called Israel. Its called Palestine. Question : What would happen if we changed the country title of Israel to Palestine in Google Maps..!”
It is funny how they call Google uncle and say to Google that the Google Map App displays wrong data for Palestine, Palestine is not called Israel, it is called Palestine. They know for sure that Google knows this fact, but i think that the real intention of this message is not to inform Google about the name of Palestine in Google Maps application, but to speak to the rest of the world.
How did these guys deface the Google.ps webpage?
I am not sure about this, but there are voices around that say they redirected the DNS to a new page. For us it does not matter much how they were able to do it, but for sure this ‘hack’ harms the image of Google. How much do you think this deface has harmed the image of Google? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
