Hackers hijacked the Comcast Website Thursday, rerouting site traffic, shutting down service and preventing millions of users from accessing e-mail or posting content for more than five hours.
The pair of hackers, who claimed to be from the group Kryogeniks, infiltrated Comcast.net, the Web mail portal for Comcast, late Wednesday. In what appeared to be a malicious prank, the hackers officially changed the registrars at Network Solutions, changing the authoritative DNS servers for the global Internet service provider, which rerouted visitors to Germany and other foreign IP addresses, according to a Broadband Reports blog.
When users attempted to access Webmail Thursday, they were greeted with a text that read: "KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."
The problem has affected access to the Comcast portal, Webmail and the official Comcast forums. While the issue was primarily resolved Thursday and Web traffic has since been re-established to the Comcast site, Comcast execs said that the incident continues to affect some customers.
"While that issue has been resolved and customers continued to have access to the Intent and e-mail through services like Outlook, some customers are currently not able to accessComcast.net or Webmail. Network engineers are working to resolve the issue," said Comcast in a statement to the Denver Post.
The Internet cable giant said it was currently working with law enforcement agencies to determine if any Comcast customers' personal information was compromised.
So far, there doesn't appear to be theft or violation of users' personal or private information, such as passwords and login credentials -- the hackers have thus far rerouted the DNS servers to send users to a third party site.
However, experts say that the hackers could easily have set up a phony site, in what is known as a spoof, impersonating the Comcast site. Once users were rerouted to the fake site, they could have been forced to download a malicious software, such as a keystroke logger or bot, onto their computer that would silently record keystrokes or steal personal and financial information, unbeknownst to them.
While it is unclear why the hackers broke into the site, some speculate the reason could be linked to Comcast's decision last year to severely limit peer-to-peer downloads over its network from BitTorrent, a file-sharing site -- a decision that provoked outrage among certain customers and elicited a class-action lawsuit.
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