Last year saw Windows NT steaming ahead yet again as the most hacked web server operating system, with the majority of defaced pages sitting on compromised NT boxes.

NT is one of the most popular options for web servers, but it appears that it is also the most popular with hackers. However, a number of companies running websites on variations of Linux also suffered the embarrassment of defacements.

The statistics were provided by defaced web page aggregation service Attrition.org. The site maintains snapshots of any pages that are reported to be hacked and is usually the first port of call for any hacker who has just defaced a website.

According to the ongoing research, Windows NT was running on 56 per cent of compromised web servers between August 1999 and today. Although none of the other operating systems came close to these figures, unknown distributions of Linux took second place with 12 per cent.

Red Hat Linux suffered seven per cent of the defacements, doing slightly better than Solaris with eight per cent. Windows 2000 was near the bottom of the list, suffering only two per cent of the successful hacking attempts.

More obscure distributions of Linux, such as Debian, Slackware, along with MacOS and BSD, were lower down the list, with Power BSD and MacOSX web servers only being hacked on one occasion.

First published on uk.internet.com