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Archive for the ‘Hacker’ Category

China’s Baidu.com sues Register.com over Attack

January 19th, 2010 Comments off

Earlier this month the same group (the “Iranian Cyber Army” that had modified Twitter’s DNS, also modified the DNS for the Chinese search engine Baidu.com. Baidu.com has now filed suit against Register.com (according to AFP) seeking damages for the interruption of the service. The group had managed to get access to the domain management account at the registrar and modified the nameserver entries for Baidu.com. Baidu stated that the DNS “was unlawfully and maliciously altered” as a result of the “gross negligence” of Register.com. After the attack, the company’s CTO, Li Yinan, resigned for personal reasons.

A number of registrars, such as Moniker and Fabulous.com are offering additional locks that can be used to prevent any changes to a domain name. Even Verisign as a registry operator has recently proposed two factor security features (approved by ICANN as a voluntary offering) based on other Verisign products and a different type of domain lock (registry-lock services, approved by ICANN) to protect the domain. However not all of these locks will protect companies from potential changes to their nameserver-entries.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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3 Charged With Comcast.net Hijacking at Network Solutions

November 20th, 2009 Comments off

Three hackers — Christopher Allen Lewis, 19,  James Robert Black Jr., 20, and Michael Paul Lebel, 28 — have been hit with a federal conspiracy charge this week due to their involvement in the 2008 hijacking of Comcast.net – a prank that took down the cable company’s homepage and email service for more than five hours and supposedly cost the company over $128,000.

According to the indictment, the hackers gained control of the Comcast.net domain along with 200 other domains with two phone calls to Network Solutions, the company’s domain registrar, as well as one email sent from a hacked Comcast email account.

This gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for all of Comcast’s domains.

Then, after changing the contact information for Comcast.net, the hackers phoned Comcast’s original technical contact to tell him what they’d done. When the Comcast manager scoffed at their claims, the hackers decided to take it a step further and redirect the site’s traffic to servers that were under their control.

The hackers are being charged under the US. Code for fraud and related activity in connection with computers.

“I wish I was a minor right now,” said hacker James Robert Black Jr., “because this is going to be really bad.”

[via Wired]

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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