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The Register Hacked
First time accepted submitter rjmx writes "Looks like The Register has been hacked. Its front page has been replaced with a page in tasteful red and black, apparently by a Turkish hacker."
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looks like the hacker retroactively stole all their credibility!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
its, not it's. Sorry about that.
website is down, cant wait to read odds and sods when its back up.... :O)
the register is shithouse anyway
Errr...UK here, seems all good to me...
Did i miss the hack? Kudos to the admin if i did. I was reading it not two hours before this too.
-1 is for flame bait and trolls, not because you disagree with someone.
Lol, why would he care about copyright? Afraid some other hacker might steal his logo?
If you saw the "hacked" page, you were being routed to a different server.
As of 2025 GMT, I'm still seeing the "hacked" page. Since I haven't specifically been to El Reg in over a week, I'm not seeing a cached copy.
As for the "hack"?
Wow. Going to be a very interesting read come Monday morning?
[End Of Line]
People are complain on twitter about him taking down UPS.com too. I only get a DNS error from them. This has to be a DNS hack.
Copyright 2005?? What the fuck? lol
Also, in the source I find:
<meta content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.3698" name="GENERATOR">
And you slashdot their homepage at the same time? Poor admins!
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
Front page still hacked, but fairly harmlessly. Does that hacker know what sort of wasps' nest he may have poked his nose into? No doubt, we shall hear more from the BOFH.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The last hacker only hacked it with OMG ponies.
Next April 1st, slashdot announces that it will accept image tags in comments. However, in preview mode all linked images will be changed to goatse. After submitting all images will be changed to Bart writing on a chalkboard "I will not post goatse images".
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Check http://www.zone-h.org/archive/notifier=TurkguvenLigi.info From the cache of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/12/mckinnon_website_defaced/ "TurkGuvenligi is a serial website defacer whose previous victims include Secunia. An archive of his work can be found here [3]. Defacers typically use search engines to search for vulnerable sites before setting on victims and uploading digital graffiti on these sites. Such hacks, by themselves, are normally trivial and seldom expose more sensitive systems."
What looks wrong with that?
I came to /. from there it was working fine. Not hacked or slashdotted. (Using OpenDNS)
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Slowest hacking in history?
along with lots of spammy sites ? dont you guys have a police force ? or is the USA still a spammers haven ?
http://www.robtex.com/ip/67.228.37.8.html
Looks like a DNS hack, which'd explain why some people are seeing it come back to life and others aren't -- all depends on ISP DNS servers (cacheing and whatnot).
Anyway, can't say I'm particularly bothered. Once upon a time, about 7 years ago, the Register went downhill so badly that I stopped visiting it all together. They had a bone-headed editorial style that made them seem arrogant, dim-witted and sometimes just unpleasant. These days, whenever I accidentally follow a YC HackerNews link there (from Twitter), it looks like they're basically the same now as then.
The tipping point for me came when some idiot on their staff wrote an article complaining that Google had drawn a special logo for a world water day, but not for St. George's day (an silly English thing that we have every year). It looks like a joke in bad taste, but I don't think it was - not least because the guy that wrote tended to have a 'toxic' element in most of his writing. I've seen a few articles since showing their scepticism of climate change, wheeling out the usual 'aren't we so clever for being able to think for ourselves' bullshit despite clearly not having 'a fucking clue'.
I guess their tech coverage was OK, but their opinions got right up my nose.
If cannot live without The Register, put into your hosts file
Linux: /etc/hosts
Windows: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host
these two lines:
72.3.246.59 theregister.co.uk
72.3.246.59 www.theregister.co.uk
And the summary of the article is apparently wrong, someone stole/hacked into TheRegister DNS zone, TheRegister www servers are intact.
theregister.co.uk seems to be down but the same group has cracked ups.com and the source shows that they used a Microsoft product.
/sarcasm
There you are, Microsoft aid crackers.
host -t NS theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk name server ns2.yumurtakabugu.com.
theregister.co.uk name server ns3.yumurtakabugu.com.
theregister.co.uk name server ns1.yumurtakabugu.com.
theregister.co.uk name server ns4.yumurtakabugu.com.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
He was uploading the packets by individual pigeon.
Unfortunately, he had to breed the pigeons himself.
Gateworld.net is down too. FYI:
Also, i do not see what good is in slashdotting them at this time.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Not really. It's a pretty decent news site with a horrible tabloid editorial slant.
When they're publishing press releases or writing humour, they're fine, but their opinion pieces & editorials are more often than not sensationalist nonsense.
I know we all get it. A hacker is not a criminal, a hacker is one who likes to tinker and break new ground by using tools for things other than they were intended. Kevin Mitnick was not a hacker, Nikola Tesla was a hacker. I agree the distinction is important. But guess what, we lost that fight.
The best thing we can do today is to come up with another word that means what hacker used to mean.
How about bit wrangler? Or just come up with something yourself and start using it and let the best jargon win. But hacker has been lost to us, it is no longer our word. You dig?
Turkguvenligi (http://twitter.com/Turkguvenligi/following) just unfollowed an account whom he was following one hour ago! YSR08 (http://twitter.com/#!/ysr08)
Using Just-Ping to check from 50+ locations around the world only 5% have what is traditionally the correct IP (212.100.234.54 according to Netcraft) or so have the current IP most say the DNS is down.
http://just-ping.com/index.php?vh=www.theregister.co.uk&c=&s=ping!
I forced an update with Netcraft it now has a record of the another IP 68.68.20.116 with different server headers which I presume is the broken site.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.theregister.co.uk
The hackers could have done more damage if they also increased the TTL of the domains they poisoned. 24 hours seems to be the time atm.
As shown by a `dig www.theregister.co.uk +trace`, DNS servers are returning the correct data already. Same for ups.com.
Several sites, including the register and ups.com were redirected by DNS to a defacement page...
A list of the sites is at:
http://www.zone-h.org/archive/notifier=TurkguvenLigi.info/page=1
It does not seem to be a DNS poisoning, since the whois servers also reported the hacker's dns servers.
Also zone-h reports that the site was running Linux, but it is clearly whatever server the hackers redirected the DNS to that runs linux, it was not necessarily a linux system that was breached in order to actually carry out the defacement.
It would appear that the registrar for the domains in question has been hacked, and the hackers chose a few high profile sites to deface.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Their back..
Looks like they have got themselves sorted again.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
1) Get some SSL keys
2) Redirect the DNS Servers
3) Profit!
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
It IS very timely, isn't it? And large scale, with no apparent profitable return for the (apparent) perps - no spyware, no stolen user data, BUT it changes our perception of Turkey in a way which suits Israel very nicely, doesn't it?
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It's a pretty decent news site with a horrible tabloid editorial slant.
When they're publishing press releases or writing humour, they're fine, but their opinion pieces & editorials are more often than not sensationalist nonsense.
"News for nerds," eh?
This same guy (or group) hacked a number of high profile websites today, or at least their dns servers.
The article is being updated with a list. So far ups.com, betfair.com, acer.com, vodafone.com, and telegraph.co.uk have all been defaced with the same image.
biting the hand that feeds it, (pun intended)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
It IS very timely, isn't it? And large scale, with no apparent profitable return for the (apparent) perps - no spyware, no stolen user data, BUT it changes our perception of Turkey in a way which suits Israel very nicely, doesn't it?
(I'm not usually known for speaking out in defense of Israel's actions and intentions, but...)
Oh yes, I used to think that Turkey was a branch office of heaven, but now that I know (or have been tricked into believing) that out of the millions of Turks, one is an evil haxor, I'm instantaneously, irrevocably convinced that the entire country is in league with the devil.
Sheeesh!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
What did they hack???
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money
The seem to have declared it 'world hacking day'. I wouldn't mind a world hacking day where everyone tries to attack websites. That way at least companies will pull up their pants once a year and it will be 'open season' on sites with crappy security. Could help.
Surprised this hasn't come up yet...
h4ck1n9 is not a cr1m3
Can somebody please shut the freaking script-kiddie who thinks he's cool up? I mean seriously...it's going on my nerves that those guys are called hackers. I mean, I'm not a hacker, not even close...hell, I'm not even a network coder because I suck at it...but I respect the real hacker community enough to exclude those guys from them.
That is, of course, assuming you've not done the DNS lookup after the attack, that the IP never changes, that they aren't running a DNS load-balanced setup, that they aren't running virtual HTTP servers (where an IP doesn't tell you which of the million-and-one websites that IP hosts that you actually want), etc.
DNS is there for a reason. It shouldn't be possible to arbitrarily change the DNS details for a domain you don't own - for a start, it means you can receive all their email or, worse, really mess with their settings without them actually knowing until they specifically check DNS (e.g. add a false SPF record to their site, add two A addresses with the first one false to slow-down all accesses to their site).
The problem here is the idiots controlling the DNS for The Register (and partly the Reg themselves for not being paranoid enough to have something check those settings religiously, or run their own nameservers) who allowed an SQL injection attack on their web interfaces that control the DNS and thus, presumably, bypass any authentication. Someone malicious could have done the same thing and routed all their traffic (including email) through a set of proxy servers and nobody would have noticed for ages.
I'd give it a month before we see the NS servers for the Reg change permanently to someone else, purely because of this incident.
Sarcasm aside, isn't that what happened to Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11?
"Oh, they might be harbouring al-quaeda!! Oh, they might have WMDs!" All due to the actions (or NON-actions in the case of WMDs) of individuals or small groups.
This is exactly what happens, the news media and American government blow the actions of a few out of proportion to support their foreign policy decisions (i.e. wars for resources).
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...as at timestamp.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
You can see this pattern with most of their staff- their articles are just often outright false. Where they're not false, they completely miss fundamental points. Where they don't miss fundamental points, they just outright lie.
So that's really why they have the reputation- they're just too agenda based. Their writers all vehemently pursue their own political agendas without care for facts, without care for reason, and worst of all- without care for the truth. That's not journalism, that's propaganda.
Hmmm. As long as the publication remains profitable, the staff should be able to write whatever the fuck they want to. You make it sound like there is some kind of obligation in the publishing business to be fair and balanced. I don't think there is. And I don't think it really matters to a discerning reader that they are calling themselves journalists when they are really just propagandists; getting all sides of a story, even the distorted side, is valuable.
I suggest the following much more informative and accurate headline and body:
NetNames Hacked, Turks temporarily hijack The Register's DNS
NetNames formal statement: At approximately 2100BST on Sunday 4 September 2011 a very small number of customer domains were redirected to an unauthorised domain name server (DNS server). This was done by placing unauthorised re-delegation orders through to the registries via our provisioning system. These orders updated the address of the master DNS servers responsible for serving data for these domains. The rogue name server then served incorrect DNS data to redirect legitimate web traffic intended for customer web sites through to a hacker holding page branded TurkGuvenligi. The unauthorised orders were added by using a SQL injection attack to gain access to a number of our customer accounts.
just a defacement probably through latest apache exploit.
Read radical news here