14 DAY TRIAL // Two men responsible for hijacking the comcast.net domain in 2008 and redirecting visitors to a rogue website, were sentenced yesterday to 18 months in prison.
Christopher Allen Lewis, a.k.a. "EBK," 20, of Newark, Delaware, and Michael Paul Nebel, a.k.a. "Slacker," 28, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, both pleaded guilty earlier this year to charges of conspiring to disrupt service at the www.comcast.net website.
The two worked together with a third co-conspirator named James Robert Black, JR., a.k.a. "Defiant," 20, of Tumwater, Washington, who was sentenced last month to four months in prison, after serving as an informant for the authorities.
All three men were members of a hacking group called KRYOGENIKS and in May 2008 they devised a plan to hijack the comcast.net domain, primarily just to show off their skills.
They began by calling a Comcast employee at home several times and under false pretenses inquired about fearnet.com, a separate domain owned by Comcast.
Using the information obtained from him they hacked into an email account used to administer many of the company's domains, including comcast.net.
The attackers then contacted Network Solutions from this hacked email and tricked the registrar's employees into giving them access to Comcast's control panel.
This allowed them to modify the comcast.net DNS records and point the domain to a server under their control, where they put up a page reading "KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK RoXed COMCAST sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."
The attack prevented Comcast customers from accessing voicemail and other services normally available on the website for several hours.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Kelly, who delivered the sentence to Lewis and Nebel ordered each of them to pay $89,578.13 in restitution for damages caused to the company.
This sort of domain hijacking incident is not singular. Earlier this year, Iranian hackers used a similar method to trick employees at Register.com into giving them access to the domain name of Baidu, China's largest search engine.