14 DAY TRIAL // A group of hackers from Indonesia managed to spoil the plain search page of Google Indonesia with additional content.
On October 5, the outfit, going by the name of “MadLeets,” posted proof that the deed was real on their Facebook page. The image provided is accompanied by a link to Zone-H, a website dedicated to hosting defaced pages.
The once simple Google search for Indonesia turned to black and contained a message from team MadLeets, saying “Security is just an illusion.”
It appears that the hackers hijacked the DNS (domain name system) servers used by Google Indonesia and changed them to ones under their control. DNS is a system responsible for translating the IP address of an online location to human-readable format (website address).
Not all users were able to access the defaced web page, which, for some time, could not be used to run Google searches. Indonesia Telkom, one of the largest telecommunications service company in the country, denied allegations (via Google Translate) that hackers breached their systems to update the DNS servers pointing to Google search.
Some time after the hijack, the hackers added a search field on the page under their control to allow users to look for information indexed by Google.
Google Indonesia confirmed the attack and said that all issues had been solved and that its other services had not been affected. It seems that hackers had no malicious intention and they only wanted to show what they could do.