Hackers on anti-Egypt spree bury Egyptology journal in the sand Hackers waging war against Egyptian websites have forced the closure of Egyptological, a journal on Egyptology. Egyptologist Kate Phizackerley, who published the web periodical with Andrea Byrnes, has also closed down her personal blog for the same reason. Egyptological was shut down after it was "targeted by a professional …
Although El Reg is by now quite well known for its URL typos, this one was particularly amusing. I thought for a moment that there were hackers keeping websites online when their owners wanted to shut them down:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/23/egyptology_site_forced_online_by_hackers/ forced ONLINE
Political reasons ... being how for these folks admitting that Egypt existed before their religion would not be politically correct?
I guess the Pyramids may be a bit of a problem. Then they could just use a Sarah Palin style explanation in that obviously Allah created them when he came into existence in about 500 AD and made them look like they were much older?
Generally Egyptians are incredibly proud of their heritage, but some Muslims have problems with it being an amazingly successful polytheistic civilisation that celebrated the human body. Sadly some of these people are senior politicians in the Salafist parties. So far none of them have called for the destruction of archaeological remains, but there have been calls for statues and inscriptions to be covered in wax. This is part of a general attack on Egyptian culture where writers and journalists are coming under increasing attack.
The owners of egyotological tried in vain to recover the website which was running WordPress. Hackers gained access to administrator accounts via an exploit
The owners of egyptological failed to patch the security glitch in WordPress
The hackers looked up the website host and managed to plant a backdoor on sitehq,egyptological was hosted on siehq. Sitehq failed to remove such backdoor in to their system, leaving other hosted sites open to attack.
This was not the work of islamists
Hackers threatened to infect the computers of anyone who was associated with egyptological
The group responsible are located in China of which they have taken down big names such as IBM
Personally looking at why either somebody, or bodies have done something I look for a reason. I can see absolutely no reason that Chinese hackers would attack a web site of Egyptology research.
I think Mike Richards suggestions for why people might attack this web site pretty plausible. Perhaps, assuming that you aren't just trying to suggest that this isn't another piece of albeit mild Islamic activity, you could expand on why a group in China would have any reason at all to hack this site?
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