14 DAY TRIAL // A group of Turkish hackers managed to affect a large number of high-profile websites by launching a DNS attack.
The websites themselves were not damaged in any way, the hackers modifying only DNS records in order to reroute traffic to one of their websites, containing propagandist messages.
Visitors of official pages like the ones owned by Vodafone, National Geographic, BetFair and The Daily Telegraph were redirected on Sunday to a third-party site containing sentences like “Hacking is not a crime.”
The name of the attackers, TurkGuvenligi, stands for Turkish Security, and so far it seems that the only intent of their actions was to have a little fun. On their internet site, confused visitors could see a declaration in which they proclaimed the 4th of September as being Hackers Day.
Graham Cluley offers a printscreen of one of the websites. Even though the damage was only done to the Domain Name System, as a precaution, users were advised not to log in to their accounts on the hacked pages.
After they've recovered their website, The Register issued a short statement in which they say that everything seems to be back to normal. As a precaution they've shutdown the log-in services for members until they have confirmation from their service provider that everything is in order.
For those who don't know yet, the DNS or the Domain Name System is the service that allows users to access websites by typing their names into the address bar of the browsers, instead of their IP address. In other words, the DNS helps users access a site much easier by translating their names into the corresponding IP addresses.
TurkGuvenligi changed these translations of the attacked domains so they would all be redirected to their own. At the time of this post, most of the internet sites seem to be back on track.