Early Saturday, visitors accesing Oracle’s main web site, www.oracle.com, are being greeted with a friendly hello. In fact, that’s all that the site is currently displaying at the time. As of 7:20AM ET on Saturday morning, Oracle.Com vistors are seeing the famous programming words, “Hello World” in plain black text on the company’s site.
Update: As of 7:48AM ET the Oracle.Com site appears to be back in its normal state.
Such a move to simply display “hello world” is unlikely for the database giant, so it’s possible that the site could have been maliciously defaced.
This would not be the first time an Oracle web property has been hacked or defaced. Other incidents include an event in September 2011 when the MySQL.Com web site was compromised by attackers, causing users who visited the site to be redirected to a site hosting the BlackHole exploit kit.
The same (MySQL.com) site was hacked back in in March 2011 when Romanian hackers “TinKode” and “NeOh” took credit for exploiting a SQL injection flaw and subsequently posting a list of usernames and passwords online.
TinKode, whose real name is Cernaianu Manole Razvan, was recently sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence and was told to pay Oracle nearly $60,000 in fines.
It’s unclear what may be the case with Oracle’s site. If it was an attack, it could have been a Web site server compromise, or possibly a DNS attack, similar to what happened earlier this week with Google.ie and Yahoo.ie.
There’s also a chance that Oracle’s web team made a mistake during a update process or site maintenance.
If attackers did compromise the site, displaying the words “Hello Word” is a rather weak and “boring” message to display. Most hackers would either look for credit or look to promote a specific cause when defacing a high profile site.
SecurityWeek has contacted Oracle for comment and will update the story as more information is received.