To celebrate the beginning of National Cyber Security Month, hackers have turned up the heat on the security companies themselves.
On Tuesday morning, hackers briefly compromised the website of AVG, the maker of one of the world's most popular free anti-virus products, as well as fellow software firm Avira. Meanwhile, the servers of popular secure-networking company PureVPN were pilfered by pirates last week -- leaving digital egg on the faces of all firms involved.
"There is no full security" was the message greeting visitors to the AVG.com website Tuesday morning, accompanied by a Palestinian national anthem and an anti-Israel screed by a group calling itself KDMS. "We can catch you!"
The anti-virus companies AVG and Avira themselves weren't hacked, but rather the underlying DNS system that directs Internet traffic, as though the Internet phone number for the website were changed in a giant digital phonebook. It's nonetheless embarrassing, wrote security expert Graham Cluley.
"It's clearly embarrassing for a security company to be hit in this fashion by hackers," Cluley noted on his blog. No customer information or sensitive data appeared to have been compromised, he added.
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