Music website hacked

Visitors to the Saratoga Music website on Dec. 15 were greeted not by the usual music schedules, but instead by a black screen with moving red text saying “Hacked Hank Sandlep” (presumably a pseudonym).

Band member and senior Margaret Maccoun said the website was hacked for a couple of hours and then the site went “Under Construction” for a while.

According to Zone-H.org, a website with a cybercrime archive, Sandlep has so far committed 481 known website defacements, starting in July 2013. He has hacked everything from lacrosse websites to technology websites. He has even hacked multiple sites outside of the U.S., such as websites from the U.K. and Czech Republic.

Still, his identity remains unknown; no public information on him can be found. His attacks have not been reported in various hacker news websites. 

Some students say they were grateful for this interruption to their finals week, because the prank relieved some of their stress.

“Thanks Hank for making me laugh when finals studying took away all my happiness,” wrote senior Gabriela Romo on Facebook on the day of the hack. 

Most students seemed to believe that there was no real motivation behind the hack and that it was just for amusement.

“Sometimes you get bored and do fun things; this was no different,” said senior Kevin Jiang. 

Jiang was surprised Sandlep chose the Saratoga Music website to hack.

“[He] amazes me — out of all the pages you could hack for email lists and stuff, you attack a website that holds no value. There aren’t even emails hosted on the site.”  

Since the end of December the Saratoga Music website was up and running again. Even so, Sandlep has been known to “redeface” some websites that have been fixed, according to his Zone-h.org record.