how can i protect my site?

make sure where your site is hosted know what securtiy is for starters

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by damnyanks:
well i see a lot of ppl defacing sites on this board can someone tell me how they do this? through perl hacks or what? do they go for your database on the site? try to get through with telnet keep pinging your server until it crashes or what?</font>

That's a bit like asking how a burglar gets into your house. It really depends on what you left open, or what he/she was able to break to get in. Sometimes machines run servers with flaws in their implementation that can be exploited, and often these exploits are made freely available to whoever wants them. Sometimes administrators make simple mistakes when configuring these services which attackers can take advantage of and do stuff that the administrator did not intend. Often on a website, the programmer coding the pages did not code in a safe manner which can give attackers an opportunity to write to files or execute commands on the server. Perhaps someone was careless with taking care of their username/password and this was grabbed and used. The list goes on and on and on ...