Website hackers have been keeping themselves busy. Following Tuesday's incident when CapitaLand malls' websites were struck by hackers, more Singapore sites have been the target of mischief-makers on the Net.

Derrick Goh, 25, sent an email to STOMP today (5 Jan), after he had come across several forum discussions online about other websites being hacked into after the CapitaLand websites incident on Tuesday (2 Jan).

Some of these websites include: University of Nevada (UNLV) Singapore campus website, Fulbond System website, Komatsu Asia's Singapore site and www.quantum.sg. The words "HacKed by SymphoeniX-Clanz" replaced the UNLV site's usual homepage content. The site has since resumed its normal content when STOMP last checked at about 8.30pm (5 Jan). Another site which is back on its feet is Fulbond System's website, after an image of the flag of Turkey and the word "White" was found on its homepage during its down time.

Fulbond Systems representatives said that they will not be lodging a police report as no confidential information was leaked as it was a product installation page which had been hacked into. However, they will be relocating their servers.

These hacked sites have been fodder for online forum discussions for netizens. It was through these forums that Derrick first discovered that the various sites were hacked into.

The 25-year old IT professional attributed the hacking incidents in Singapore to inadequate education in these areas.

"Many young web developers in our region are not aware of these common security loopholes or may have neglected these issues during the development and testing phase. From what I've gone through, the schools here also do not emphasise much on these security problems," he said. "Luckily I've gained some useful experience for having done quite a number of web projects over the years. I've also fixed similar problems for some hacked websites before."

He also guessed that "some hackers deface websites for political means and some do it out of fun to get better ranking position in hacking community websites."

How can organisations protect themselves against hackers? How will it affect netizens?