A snapshot of Zone-H was taken on a Tuesday afternoon. Nothing special about the day — no major geopolitical event, no coordinated campaign known at the time. Just a regular Tuesday. And yet every single entry on the front page was a government website. Thai municipal portals. Brazilian state government sites. A couple from Timor-Leste. All Linux. All compromised.

For those unfamiliar with Zone-H, it's essentially the scoreboard for website defacement — the largest public archive of its kind, with over 15 million verified attacks logged since 2002. Hackers deface a site, then submit it to Zone-H for clout. It gets verified, mirrored, and permanently archived. Think of it as a hall of fame that nobody asked for.

Most people in infosec dismiss defacement as script kiddie stuff. And honestly, a lot of it is. But spend enough time scrolling through Zone-H and a pattern emerges that's harder to shrug off: it's the same types of targets, over and over and over again. Government sites in countries where public-sector cybersecurity capacity has not kept pace with the threat landscape.

By the Numbers

Here's where Zone-H's stats sat at the time of the snapshot:

• Total notifications — 291,981

• Single IP attacks — 109,461 (37.5%)

• Mass defacements — 182,520 (62.5%)

That mass defacement number is the one worth staring at. Nearly two-thirds of everything in the archive is a mass attack — meaning someone found one hole and used it to pop dozens of sites on the same shared server. These aren't targeted operations. They're spray-and-pray with a working exploit and a bot that does the rest.

Who's Doing This

A few names kept showing up on the day in question.

0xLadiesMan217

Eleven hits in a single day, all Thai local government. The pattern is dead simple — drop a file called EXADOS.html or terror.html into the web root and move on to the next one. Shared hosting makes it trivial. What stands out is how many of these had the Redefacement flag. That “R” means the site was already defaced before, somebody restored it (often by re-uploading index.html without addressing the underlying vuln), and then the same attacker — or a different one exploiting the same hole — walked right back in. It's a frustrating cycle, especially given that this is public infrastructure.

EXA-DOS

This one's a different animal. Where 0xLadiesMan217 stuffs files into subdirectories, EXA-DOS straight up replaces the homepage. Full homepage takeover. And the volume is insane — filtering Zone-H to just this actor returns 648 notifications. 435 mass defacements.

But the real kicker is the timestamps. Twenty-four government homepages gone in under two minutes. Every one of them is a .go.th domain. Every one runs Linux. And most of them have that “R” flag, which means this isn't even the first time. The sites had been previously restored, but the underlying vulnerabilities clearly weren't addressed in the process.

Sharp Crew

Five entries, all Brazilian municipal government. .gov.br and .sp.gov.br — small city portals in places like Caraguatatuba and Medeiros Neto. Homepage takeovers, mass flagged. The Portuguese-only targeting suggests they're either Brazilian themselves or at least operating in that language sphere. Either way, same story: small local-government sites running on shared infrastructure with limited defensive resources.

Others

There's also aDriv4 (two hits across Thai and Brazilian .gov domains, all redefacements) and Ramil Feyziyev (targeting Timor-Leste's .gov.tl — a small national domain with correspondingly limited defensive resources).

Why It's Always Developing Countries

After looking at this data for a while, the honest answer is boring: money, staffing, and priorities. Or rather, the lack of all three.

There's nobody watching the door

In the US, the UK, across the EU — there are CSIRTs monitoring pretty much every sector. Got hacked? There's a team for that. In the developing world, not so much. The numbers from the World Bank are pretty grim:

• Only 5 out of 22 countries in West and Central Africa have a functioning CSIRT. Five.

• East and Southern Africa does a bit better — 10 out of 26.

• Across the entire continent, there are fewer than 25,000 certified cybersecurity professionals. For 1.4 billion people.

• Cyber incidents in Africa racked up an estimated $3 billion in losses between 2019 and 2025.

No CSIRT means no detection, no investigation, no root cause analysis. Someone defaces a site, maybe an admin notices a few days later, re-uploads the old files, and calls it done. The vuln stays open. The attacker comes back whenever they feel like it.

Security budgets that don't exist

Here's the thing about municipal government websites in places like rural Thailand or small-town Brazil — there often isn't a security budget, and frequently no dedicated IT person. These sites get stood up on the cheapest shared hosting available, someone installs WordPress or Joomla, and then it just... sits there. Patching falls off the radar. Logs go unmonitored. The CMS version from 2019 is still running because there's nobody whose job it is to update it, and institutional knowledge of the system has often moved on with staff turnover.

The World Bank put $250 million into building cyber resilience across 64 developing countries over a ten-year period. Sounds like a lot until the math is done: that's about $3.9 million per country per decade. There are startups that spend more than that on AWS in a year.

One vuln, twenty-four sites

Shared hosting is cheap and accessible — which is exactly why it's so widely used for small government sites. The tradeoff is that when it's misconfigured at the tenant level, one compromised WordPress install on a shared server can give an attacker access to every other site on that same box. That's why 62.5% of Zone-H is mass defacements. EXA-DOS didn't need to find twenty-four separate vulnerabilities. They needed one. The shared environment did the rest.

The leaderboard effect

There's a reason these guys target .gov domains specifically. In the defacement community, government sites are trophies. A .go.th homepage takeover carries more weight than some random WordPress blog nobody's heard of. Researchers at NSCR studied 2.7 million defacement attacks and found that a tiny slice of defacers — about 2.9% — were behind 68.5% of all attacks. And what motivated those power users? They wanted to be the best defacer. That's literally what they said in their Zone-H submissions. Government sites in developing countries combine high prestige value with limited defensive coverage, which makes them attractive to status-driven attackers.

It Gets Worse Than Defacement

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Here's the troubling part about all this. Defacement is visible. It's embarrassing, sure, but it's ultimately just a webpage getting replaced. The problem is that the same broken infrastructure that lets a defacer in also lets in everyone else — and those other actors aren't interested in clout. They want data, money, or leverage.

Thailand

The .go.th mass defacements on Zone-H are the tip of a much uglier iceberg. In July 2025, someone hit the Thailand Ministry of Labour hard — defaced the website, exfiltrated 300 GB of data, claimed they encrypted 2,000 laptops, nuked Active Directory, and wiped the tape backups. Ransom demand: $15 million. That's not a defacement. That's a full-scale intrusion that started with the exact same kind of weak infrastructure seen on Zone-H every day.

Then there's the geopolitical angle. When tensions flared between Thailand and Cambodia over a border dispute in mid-2025, hacktivist groups started targeting Thai .gov sites with defacements — one group claimed 73 attacks in two weeks. Thailand's DSI had already confirmed 16 government domains compromised in a coordinated attack back in October 2024. The infrastructure was already under strain, and the surge of hacktivist activity exploited gaps that were already present.

Brazil

Brazil's situation might actually be worse because of how creative the exploitation has gotten. In 2024, a Folha investigation found that thousands of .gov.br sites had been hijacked for “parasite SEO” — attackers injected gambling content and worse into these domains because Google trusts .gov URLs. They weren't replacing homepages. They were quietly borrowing the domain authority of municipal government sites to rank their scam content in search results. Some of these injected pages included terms for child exploitation. On government domains.

On top of that, Brazilian government infrastructure shows up regularly on dark web marketplaces. Not just stolen databases — actual exploit listings, SQL injection templates for specific municipal sites with instructions on where to put the payload, DDoS-as-a-service offerings targeting .gov.br. The defacements visible on Zone-H are just the ones where someone bothered to claim credit.

The Redefacement Problem

That “R” flag deserves attention because it's one of the most telling indicators in the whole archive.

The Redefacement flag on Zone-H means a site was hacked, restored, and then hacked again. It's a public record of incident response that addressed the visible symptom — the altered page — without addressing the underlying access path.

In any reasonable security operation, the steps are: get hit, figure out how, patch it, harden the box, and monitor for a while to make sure nobody's still inside. That's the baseline. What tends to happen with under-resourced municipal sites is closer to: the one available IT contact restores from a backup over the weekend and gets the site back online. The visible problem is solved, but the underlying vulnerability — the ancient CMS, the default creds, the unpatched PHP — remains in place. Without dedicated security staff or tooling, root cause analysis simply isn't part of the process.

So naturally, a week later, the same thing happens again. Sometimes the same attacker. Sometimes a different one who found the same open door. And now there's a second line item on Zone-H with that purple “R” next to it — a public signal that the underlying vulnerability is still in place.

A count of the R flags on the EXA-DOS page is revealing. Out of 24 entries visible in that screenshot, the majority are redefacements. These Thai government sites have been through this cycle multiple times already, which underscores how much the current model of incident response — focused on visible restoration rather than root cause — needs additional support to break the loop.

The Bigger Picture

Zoom out from Zone-H for a second and the divide gets even starker. A few numbers stand out from the research:

• 23% of West and Central African countries have a CSIRT. In the EU it's essentially 100%. The disparity is significant.

• Africa: 25,000 cybersecurity professionals for 1.4 billion people. The US: over 1.1 million for 340 million. A substantial difference in per-capita capacity.

• In West and East Africa, cybercrime now accounts for more than 30% of all reported crime. Not cyber-specific crime. All crime.

• The World Bank's entire decade-long cyber resilience investment across 64 countries ($250M) wouldn't cover the annual security budget of JPMorgan Chase.

• India's national CERT runs on about $29.5M a year. Canada — with roughly 1/40th the population — spends $36.7M on theirs.

The defacements are the visible symptom. But the underlying condition is that significant parts of the developing world are running government infrastructure with very limited security oversight. And the people exploiting that aren't all script kiddies chasing Zone-H rankings. Some of them are ransomware operators. Some are state-sponsored groups. Some are just opportunistic criminals who know a soft target when they see one.

So What Now

“Recommendations” sections always feel a bit hand-wavy. But after staring at this data long enough, a few things seem pretty obvious:

1. National cyber agencies need to look down, not just up

Most national cybersecurity strategies focus on ministries and critical infrastructure at the federal level. The defacement epidemic, however, is concentrated at the municipal tier — where coverage tends to be thinnest. CSIRTs need a clear mandate (and funding) to support local government, not just the larger agencies.

2. Hosting providers can play a bigger role here

If 62.5% of defacements are mass attacks on shared hosting, hosting providers are well-positioned to help shift the picture. Even small additions at the budget tier — basic tenant isolation, automated vulnerability scanning, default security baselines — would meaningfully raise the cost of these mass attacks. There's a real opportunity for providers serving the public sector to differentiate on security as a baseline feature.

3. “Restoring” a site is not incident response

This bears repeating. If the entire IR process is re-uploading the old index.html, the incident has not really been responded to — it's just a timer set for the next one. Root cause analysis isn't optional; it's the whole point.

4. The international funding doesn't match the threat

$250M over a decade across 64 countries was a good start in 2014. It's not enough now. Not when African cybercrime losses alone hit $3 billion in six years. The numbers need to go up by at least an order of magnitude.

5. Actually use Zone-H

This is free intelligence. Anyone running security for a government in the developing world should be monitoring Zone-H for their domains. It'll flag a hit before anyone internally notices. And if that R flag appears next to a name, it means the last fix didn't work.

Final Thoughts

That EXA-DOS screenshot is hard to forget. Twenty-four government sites. Two minutes. Most of them hit before.

People like to call defacement the graffiti of the internet, and the comparison makes sense. It's ugly, it's annoying, and by itself it doesn't really hurt anyone. But here's what that analogy misses: if someone is spray-painting a wall, it means they got past the fence. And if they're spray-painting the same wall for the third time, it means there still isn't a fence.

In many parts of the developing world, government web infrastructure is operating with limited defensive capacity, often without the basic monitoring and patching cycles that protect comparable infrastructure elsewhere. Every defacement on Zone-H is a public reminder of that gap. The question that actually matters is whether the international community will close it before the next visitor isn't just carrying a spray can.

Sources

• Zone-H.org defacement archive, accessed March 4, 2026

• World Bank — “Enhancing Cyber Resilience in Developing Countries,” Jan 2025

• World Economic Forum — Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025

• Help Net Security — “Developing economies are falling behind in the fight against cybercrime,” Oct 2025

• NSCR — “Offending patterns of hackers in website defacements”

• The Cyber Express — “Thailand Ministry of Labour Cyberattack Exposes 300GB Data,” Jul 2025

• The Record — “Pro-Cambodian hacktivists launch attacks on Thai government sites,” 2025

• Thai News — “DSI Cracks Down on Massive Cyberattack: 16 Government Sites Compromised,” 2024

• Interlira Reports — “Thousands of Brazilian Government Websites Are Hacked,” Jul 2024

• Google Cloud Threat Intelligence — “Cyber Threats Targeting Brazil”

• PT Security — “The cybercrime market in Brazil”

• The Record — “Countries increasing cyber response budgets — spending still varies widely”

Zone-H data published under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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