Fraudsters hack into Home Office website

Hackers hijack critical Internet organization sites

Written by By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld
June 27, 2008
Original

Turkish gang redirect ICANN, IANA traffic, taunt 'We control the domains!'

Turkish hackers yesterday defaced the official sites of the international organizations that oversee the Internet's critical routing infrastructure and regulate domain names, researchers said today.

A group calling itself "NetDevilz" claimed responsibility for the hack, which Thursday morning temporarily redirected visitors to the sites for IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Users who tried to reach iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net were shunted to an illegitimate site, said researchers at zone-h.org, a group that collects evidence of site attacks, including page defacements and redirects. According to a screen capture of the defacement snapped by zone-h.org, the bogus site simply displayed a taunting message: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

IANA, ironically, is the organization responsible for managing the DNS root zone and assigning the DNS operators for the Internet's top-level domains, such as .com and .org. DNS, which translates the domains and URLs -- such as computerworld.com -- into IP addresses, is a critical component of the Web's traffic-guiding infrastructure.

ICANN, which oversees IANA, also allocates IP address space and manages the Web's top-level domain naming system.

Perhaps not coincidental to the defacement, ICANN was in the news yesterday for voting to relax the rules in assigning and managing generic top-level domains.

The hackers redirected IANA and ICANN traffic to the same IP address that they used last week when they broke into Photobucket Inc.'s image-sharing site and pushed its users to a server operated by Atspace.com, a German hosting service, said Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev in a blog post today.

A spokesman for ICANN contacted Friday morning wasn't aware of the hack, and declined comment until he found find out more.

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d in figuring out how to take advantage of the flaw, technical details of which are being kept secret for a month to give companies time to update computers.

"This is a pretty important day," said Jeff Moss, founder of a premier Black Hat computer security conference held annually in Las Vegas.

"We are seeing a massive multi-vendor patch for the entire addressing scheme for the internet - the kind of a flaw that would let someone trying to go to Google.com be directed to wherever an attacker wanted."

Hackers using the vulnerability to attack company computer networks would also be able to capture email and other business data.

Kaminsky alerted US national security agencies to the crack in cyber warfare defenses.

"This really shows the value-add of independent security researchers," said former Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Security Division director Jerry Dixon.