Deceptive Duo Strikes Again

The Deceptive Duo, a Web defacement crew that has struck several government and banking sites in the last week, on Thursday defaced a site belonging to Gartner Inc., an IT research firm. As of 4:45 p.m. EDT Thursday, the site located at http://asiapac.gartner.com/press was still displaying the defacement.

Gartner, based in Stamford, Conn., conducts research and analysis on various segements of the high-tech industry. As such it makes a high-profile, if somewhat odd, target. The Deceptive Duo has until now attacked mainly U.S. government and banking sites as part of a campaign that the pair says is aimed at alerting officials to the inherent vulnerability of the countrys IT infrastructure.

In its defacement, the pair mocked the kind of pronouncements that Gartner and other research firms make their living with. “Many recent cyberattacks could have been avoided if enterprises were more focused on their security efforts, but users seem not to learn from their mistakes,” reads a line at the top of the site, which is attributed to Richard Mogull, a Gartner research director. The line appears to be taken from a U.K. trade publication that is paraphrasing Mogulls conclusions in a recent research report.