Zone-H celebrates its 10 years!

09/03/2012 Written by Kevin Fernandez (Siegfried)

10 years ago Zone-​H opened, a lit­tle web­site with secu­rity news and a “cyber­crime archive” which quickly became suc­cess story. The goals of Zone-​H were to fol­low secu­rity trends and ana­lyze the grow­ing impor­tance of hacktivism.

It was born in Esto­nia on march 2, 2002 and started to save deface­ments on march 9, one week later.

The first ver­sion was a sim­ple PHP web­site with some html frames (this is why it doesn’t appear well on archive​.org):

http://web.archive.org/web/20020327120118/http://www.zone-h.com/

A few months later, a new ver­sion of the site was cre­ated, which had secu­rity news, advi­sories, a huge down­load sec­tion with secu­rity tools and some inter­est­ing doc­u­ments about frauds/​scams. By the end of the year of 2003 Zone-​H had already recorded 400.000 dig­i­tal attacks.

What also made this new ver­sion of the site famous was its anony­mous forum, espe­cially the “0day rumors” one, which became “the place” where secu­rity researchers and hack­ers came to brag or lie about their new discoveries.

The “bucon pre­mière reports” were pub­lished for some months, this move was an attempt to make the site closer to the real issues of the world and link them to online activism, this is why the slo­gan changed from “the inter­net ther­mome­ter” to “unre­stricted infor­ma­tion” as we always thought the attacks we record every­day were going to be more and more impor­tant, and more and more linked to the world itself. The increase of attacks dur­ing the wars of Iraq and Lebanon, then the arrival of “Anony­mous” showed we were right from the start.

Here is how the site was looking:

http://web.archive.org/web/20031224142944/http://zone-h.org/

Those years Zone-​H also opened var­i­ous mir­rors in dif­fer­ent lan­guages which all had their own secu­rity news and advisories.

At the end of 2006, Zone-​H moved to a Joomla-​based ver­sion, with a focus on news cov­er­age and the trans­la­tion of the arti­cles in over 10 languages.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060803122720/http://zone-h.org/

Then at the begin­ning of 2009 Zone-​H opened this new ver­sion you are seeing!

We would like to thank Jeri­cho from attri​tion​.org who donated their archive to us a few years back, which we didn’t include yet! (it is on the road!). This will make the cyber­crime data­base start from 1995!

And also to the all​das​.org own­ers, par­tic­u­larly Ste­fan Wag­ner, who also donated the All​das​.org data­base to us last year, and that is already partly included on the site!

While both data­bases con­tain only some thou­sands of deface­ments, which seems very small com­pared to the 7 mil­lions mir­rors we now have, it is a very impor­tant piece of the inter­net his­tory that will stay online, all in one place!

We would like to thank all the mem­bers who helped along the years, either pub­lish­ing mir­rors, writ­ing news or sup­port­ing us, this is thanks to all of them that Zone-​H is still here now! Thank you!