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Comcast Briefly Loses Control of Its Domain Name

Posted by kdawson on from the old-skool-pwned dept.

Fallen Andy notes that Comcast, one of the largest US ISPs, lost control of its domain name to what appeared to be juvenile social engineers of the old school — i.e. not in it for the money. The intruders got into Comcast's registrar account at Network Solutions and repointed the domain's DNS records. A blog entry at SANS points out how trivially easy this can be. Reader ElvenKnight points out an insightful interview up at Wired with the two young guys who perpetrated the hack.

2 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The consequences might not be as fun by pz · · Score: 0, Troll

    Did you read TFA? They had to work very hard, all night long to maintain their redirected pages, cycling through 50 different (presumably free) hosting accounts, repeatedly moving the DNS entry. They could have just given back the registration, but instead they worked for hours to maintain the disruption, going without or sleeping very little. That sounds like evidence of intent to cause harm. But, if the quote in the Wired article is genuine, there is no question about it being intentional harm with wide impact, and therefore terrorism: "Comcast is just a huge corporation, and we wanted to take them out, and we did."

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  2. Re:The consequences might not be as fun by bishiraver · · Score: 0, Troll

    Soccer moms couldn't check their webmail at 3am for the spicy email the man they're having an affair with sent them.

    And maybe the son who walked in on her 'preparing' to read it.