UK architects institute RIBA falls victim to Chinese crackers

Last weekend, the membership database of the Royal Institution of British Architects (RIBA) was breached by a malicious attack that apparently originated from China. A technical spokesman for RIBA confirmed to heise online that the breach was accomplished by SQL injection.

RIBA closed down the database and informed its membership, and there are no signs that any data were stolen, or of fraud relating to the data. The attack was traced to a Chinese source primarily known for spamming. It is therefore probable that RIBA was not specifically targeted, but merely one of the victims of a large scale automated attack such as that which occurred in January.

(mba)