by Zack Whittaker
July 23rd, 2008 @ 5:37 am

Oh the fun. Once again, another police website has been hacked by a student, showing that even the police aren’t safe from all crimes. This is another link in the long chain of attacks over the years from egotistical teenagers trying to get a kick out of life without sticking a needle in their arm.

Bedfordshire Police had their website hacked and defaced, replacing the content with Arabic and an animation of a man carrying a Tunisian flag. The perpetrator of the attack is known to be a 17 year old US student by the name of Arfaoui Firas, and a site snapshot shows the website after it was defaced. This comes as the news of the website being brought back from the ashes has finally gone live again.

A spokesperson for Bedfordshire Police said, according to the BBC: “The website is hosted externally, away from all other police systems so no personal or confidential data could have been obtained. Bedfordshire Police take security extremely seriously, which is why the website is hosted independently and outside all other IT systems.”

Let’s throw in some background material here. Police forces around the country and around the world have databases packed with information about crimes, people and citizens, drivers licence details, things like that. To then have a website on the same network or server as the rest of these secure databases would be a huge security risk; which is why they don’t.