History of hacking moment. In 2008, a group calling itself “NetDevilz” claimed responsibility for a hack that temporarily redirected visitors to the sites for IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to another IP address. The hack was quickly corrected within 20 minutes, and an investigation was ongoing to determine how the redirection occurred.
Users who tried to reach iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net were shunted to an illegitimate site. 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?”
The Turkish hacker group “NetDevilz” was involved in several high-profile hacking incidents in 2008, including the hijacking of the DNS records of Photobucket, as well as the defacement and hijacking of the websites of ICANN and IANA. The group claimed responsibility for these acts. However, there is no information available in the search results to indicate that the members of this group were ever caught.
The hackers redirected IANA and ICANN traffic to the same IP address that they used when they broke into Photobucket Inc.’s image-sharing site and pushed its users to a server operated by Atspace, a German hosting service, said Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev in a blog post Friday.
Years ago when this happened, I made a note that I did notice that Photobucket outage, but I did not think it was due to hacking.
Successful hacker attacks, even brief ones, highlight the need for more ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities and report them to companies before any damage is done.
Citations:
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/photobuckets-dns-records-hijacked-by-turkish-hacking-group/
[2] https://www.wired.com/2008/06/icann-and-iana/
[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/turkish-criminal-hackers-hijack-icann-sites/
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/icann-and-ianas-domains-hijacked-by-turkish-hacking-group/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C40069388000257475005F6F4D.html?ref=technology
[6] https://www.darkreading.com/perimeter/turkish-hackers-take-out-top-porn-site
[7] https://www.websitepulse.com/monitor/94.hackers-hijack-critical-internet-organizations
[8] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/turkish-hacker-convicted-of-intricate-atm-robberies-netting-55-milion/
[9] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/turkish-hackers-crack-icann-115456
[10] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534439/hackers-hijack-critical-internet-organization-sites.html
[11] https://www.crn.com/news/security/208801497/hackers-hijack-sites-of-internet-organizations
[12] https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZV4FPfQBp0k
[13] https://www.cshub.com/attacks/news/sony-data-breach-multiple-hackers
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2008/06/27/iana_and_icann_hijacked/
