We couldn't believe this. Comcast, an internet service providing giant, had its domain stolen and its traffic rerouted. This article really shows how insecure your domain name registration can be with the wrong company, in this case Network Solutions, a leading competitor. It would never happen with FYNE™.

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May 30, 2008
by Eric Benderoff, Chicago Tribune
Hackers alter Comcast home page
Group rerouted millions of Internet customers to site with cryptic message

Millions of Comcast Corp. Internet customers woke up Thursday with no access to e-mail after a known group of computer hackers broke into the company's Web domain and redirected traffic to a site displaying a cryptic message. The event started at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, and many customers could still not access Comcast.net well into Thursday, said spokesman Charlie Douglas.

The cable company is working with law enforcement agencies to "do the forensics" on what happened, he said, adding, "there's no evidence that customer data was lost."

As discomforting as the situation is for Comcast and its customers, it could have been much worse, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior anti-virus researcher for Kaspersky Lab. The hackers could have put up a fake home page, known as a spoof, and tried to lure people into turning over private information.

Instead, the hackers put up a page with this message: "KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven." If they had set up a Web page that looked like Comcast.net, customers might not have known the site had been hacked, Schouwenberg said. "It could have been a big problem. There was serious potential."

The supposed hackers.named Kryogeniks, Defiant and EBK.appear more interested in "fame, not fortune," Schouwenberg said, adding that "Kryogeniks is known for hacking into a number of MySpace profiles belonging to celebrities."

The hackers changed what's known as the DNS settings by hacking the Comcast.net account at domain registrar Network Solutions. They rerouted the traffic to Internet addresses in Germany and elsewhere, said Karl Bode, editor for Web site BroadbandReports.com.

He called it "trickery" in an e-mail and said "the last few years has seen a serious uptick in DNS related outages. This is the first instance that I can recall in the last five years of a major carrier's Web site going completely offline due to a hack. In this case though, keep in mind that [based on the information on hand] it was Network Solutions' security, or lack thereof, that was to blame, not Comcast's."

A representative for Network Security did not return calls for comment.

It is unclear why the hack was perpetrated, but some Web sites are speculating the hackers were protesting Comcast's recent moves to "throttle" large-file downloads over its network from file-sharing site BitTorrent. While much of the content on BitTorrent is legal, there is considerable sharing of copy-protected material, and Comcast has been using techniques to curtail the activity, The Associated Press reported last year.

Comcast has 14.1 million high-speed Internet customers, making it the nation's second-largest provider behind AT&T's 14.6 million customers. Neither service provider would disclose how many customers they have in the Chicago area.

The Comcast hack is "only special because it's big," Schouwenberg said, generating a lot of publicity for the hackers. "There are a lot of sites compromised every hour, they just don't get the same attention."

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