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Long before schoolboys furtively reassembled encoded newsgroup images from the likes of alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female, second-hand bookshops played a significant role in sex education. Erudite but perversely erotic works such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, were particularly prized in the hope that they would remain unpurchased for several repeat visits to browse them.

Bret Wood's movie of the same name (although it could easily have degenerated into Woody Allen meets von Krafft-Ebing) must be equally valued by modern schoolboys with a penchant for cinematography and (if a victim of Region 1 despotism) a multi-region DVD player.

Maybe the time has come for someone as innovative as von KrafftEbing to write Psychopathia Internetualis, a psychiatric analysis of all the pathological behaviour that we experience online. As ever, there are many parallels with the real world such as those with the propensity to rush out and spray or daub innocently blank surfaces with graffiti. Mercifully, there's as yet no Webbsy artist to match Banksy in the defacement of websites, so I think all of us on this side of the fence see website defacement as anti-social if not inevitably criminal.

Zone-H, a singular focus of information about website defacement, publishes periodic analyses of events that have been registered with it. Peaks of activity appear to occur randomly - in August 2006 defacements exceeded 130,000, an all-time record. Over the past three years, Linux has remained

Although Mac OS X servers have risen considerably in popularity, registered defacements on Mac OS X have declined to about 1500 in 2007. This contrasts with trends in the web server software running at the time: Apache is by far the most popular server for defacement, with more than 300,000 registrations in 2005 and 2007, and a peak of 486,000 (nearly two-thirds of all defacements) in 2006. Of course, it's hard to know how many sites are running on different server software or operating systems: Netcraft figures at news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html are interesting but by no means complete, in any case concentrating on larger and commercial sites.

There's a lot to be learned from analysis of the methods of attack that succeeded in capturing web servers. Most popular were password stealing, sniffing and the like against the administrator or another admin user, exploitation of server misconfiguration of shares, file inclusion and perhaps inevitably SQL injection. Other methods, such as DNS cache poisoning, social engineering attack against DNS, URL poisoning, intrusion via external modules, and rerouting after successful firewall or router attack, are notably common. As Bruce Schneier's long-held thesis has it, humans are invariably the weakest link in any secure system.

The reasons given for attack bring us back to our draft chapter in Psychopathia Internetualis: the bulk of defacements were because the perpetrator just wanted to be the best defacer for fun or the challenge. Far fewer were for political and patriotic reasons, or to get revenge against the website.

One of von Krafft-Ebing's more lasting contributions was the word 'masochist' from von Sacher-Masoch's autobiographical novella Venus in Furs. I wonder if we will see a neologism coined to describe the bizarrely destructive who get their kicks out of defacing websites. 'Webvandals', anyone?