4 X Security Team

What happens when the official domain names of the organizations that issue the domain names in general, and provide all the practical guidance on how the prevent DNS hijacking, end up having their own domain names hijacked? A wake up call for the Internet community.

The official domains of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority were hijacked earlier today, by the NetDevilz Turkish hacking group which also hijacked Photobucket’s domain on the 18th of June. Zone-H mirrored the defacements, some of which still remain active for the time being :

The ICANN and IANA websites were defaced earlier today by a Turkish group called “NetDevilz”. ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. These include domain names, as well as the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources.

NetDevilz left the following message on all of the domains :

“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? haha :) (Lovable Turkish hackers group)”

The following domains were hijacked, and some of them still return the defaced page - icann.net; icann.com; iana-servers.com; internetassignednumbersauthority.com; iana.com.

The hackers are once again redirecting the visitors to Atspace.com, 82.197.131.106 in particular, the ISP that they used in the Photobucket’s DNS hijacking. And while Photobucket hasn’t issued an official statement on the DNS hijack, Atspace.com did so last week, a copy of which you can find here.

The NetDevilz hacking group seems to be taking advantage of a very effective approach when hijacking domain names, and while they declined to respond to an email sent by Zone-H on how they did it,  cross-site scripting or cross-site request forgery vulnerability speculations are already starting to take place.

One thing’s for sure though, if the ICANN and IANA can lose control of their domains, anyone can.

[Source: zdnet]

June 18th, 2008

Yesterday, Photobucket the world’s most popular photo sharing site according to Hitwise had its DNS records hijacked to return a hacked page courtesy of the NetDevilz hacking group, a Turkish web site defacement group most widely known for its defacement of the adult video site Redtube earlier this year. Photobucket users across the world are reporting minor outages of the service and problems when trying to access their accounts, the consequence of what looks like the type of DNS records hijacking that redirected Comcast.net to a third-party domain last month.

Third-party site monitoring services indicate that the site was down for 15 minutes yesterday, from from 17:39:39 to 17:55:10, whereas according to a comment left by a Photobucket Forum Support representative, the downtime due to the propagation of the corrected DNS entries was longer :

“On Tuesday afternoon, some users that typed in the Photobucket.com URL were temporarily redirected to an incorrect page due to an error in our DNS hosting services. The error was fixed within an hour of its discovery, but due to the nature of the problem, some users will not have access to Photobucket for a few hours as the fix rolls out. It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect.”

The NetDevilz hacking group left the following message, that appears to have been loading from a third-party domain, atspace.com in this case :

“… ve NeTDevilz yeniden sahnede

Bizi hatırlayan var mı ? Unutulduğumuzu düşündük ve tekrar hatırlatmaya karar verdik !
( Turkish hackers group )

ZeberuS - GeCeCi - MiLaNo - The_BeKiR - h4ckinger - SerSaK - KinSize

we are came back !
©2008 NetDevilz Co.
We’re not first,But We’re the BEST!”

The hacking group appears to have been using the hosting services of atspace.com, the web hosting service of Zetta hosting solutions, and users of Photobucket attempting to access the site with the old DNS entries are still being redirected to a default hosting ad page within atspace.com. The effect of the redirection can also be seen by taking a peek at the publicly obtainable stats for atspace.com, where the sudden peak in traffic resulting in 118,864 visitors for today came from the default ad page used in the redirection.

With the second DNS hijacking attack against a high-profile domain in the recent months, it seems that adaptive malicious parties unable to directly compromise a site will continue taking advantage of good old-fashioned DNS hijacking. At least to prove that it’s still possible even on a high-profile domain using the services of a Tier 1 domain registrar.