The website of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) was hacked on Wednesday.
The landing page was replaced with a page of scrolling binary code and the heading “rEd X Was Here”, along with the phrase “Proud to be a Bangladeshi Hacker”. In addition, the hacked page plays a pop song from Korean singer Hari.
Usually, members of the public are able to use the site to check and pay for outstanding traffic fines or other infringement notices. Aarto is not an entity but rather an act that was approved by parliament in 1998. It was intended to make the collecting of fines more efficient and to encourage the public to take traffic offences more seriously.
It appears the motive for the hack was simply to deface the website and the comment “Dear admin, secure your site” suggests the culprit may simply have exploited a security vulnerability for its own sake. The hacker also left a message of greeting for “all members of 3xp1r3 Cyber Army”.
3xp1r3 Cyber Army, also known as 3CA, is a group of hackers based in Bangladesh that specialises in defacing websites and claims to have done so to more than a thousand sites to date.
An Aarto representative could not be reached for comment on Wednesday morning. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
