The same Turkish Hacking Group, NetDevilz, responsible for the hacking and defacement of the popular photo sharing site, Photobucket, has been reported to have briefly succeeded in accessing ICANN and IANA domain names yesterday, June 26, 2008, and redirecting them to a page containing the 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?"

Hijacked domains include "icann.com", "icann.net", "iana.com" and "iana-servers.com" which, contrary to reports in the media (ZDNet, New York Times), are not the official domains—the official domains are 'icann.org' and 'iana.org'. It has also been reported that the same IP address used for the hacking of Photobucket website, was used again for both ICANN's and IANA's hacked domains.

Latest response received by CircleID from ICANN states that the problem took place at their registrar level. A Whois look up shows Register.com as the registrar for the hacked domains. ICANN has further stated that the registrar "fixed the dns redirection within 20 minutes of us notifying them of the problem. The registrar is actively investigating what happened and has promised to report back to us on what happened."

The hacking incident was first reported by researchers at zone-h.org, a group that collects evidence of site attacks, including page defacements and redirects.

Update: (Jul 4, 2008) ICANN has released an official statement in response to the incident.

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Related topics: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Security