The defacement of one of Kaspersky Lab's partner Web sites over the weekend occurred while the site was under construction and offered no data to steal, a senior company official said Tuesday.
A hacker going by the nickname of "m0sted" broke in and left various messages on several pages of a partner site for Malaysia. Screenshots were posted on Zone-H.org, a site that tracks vandalism of other Web sites.
The site actually belongs to one of Kaspersky's partners and was still under development, said David Emm, senior technology consultant. The site had not been formally launched or publicized, he said.
"Naturally, we'll be making sure that it's locked down before it goes live and any business is conducted on the site," Emm said.
The hacker claimed the site was compromised via SQL (Structured Query Language) injection, where malicious code is dropped inside Web-based forms in order to get a response from the back-end server. The style of attack has been increasingly favored by hackers, as many Web sites are vulnerable, which can lead to a serious data breach.
Zone-H.org theorized that an attacker could have uploaded malicious code to the site and labeled it as a trial download of Kaspersky's software, but the company dismissed any risks.
"It seems clear that the attacker's only motive was to attract attention," according to a company statement. "We therefore do not believe that this attack could harm users in any way."