14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago a hacker group from Turkey, calling themselves the NetDEvilz, managed to redirect traffic from the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) web pages to another site where they claimed that they were in control of the net. The corporation is now coming out to say that the official .org sites were never infected, and that the traffic was directed towards a mirror .com site. ICANN also mentions that the incident was the fault of the registrar entrusted to manage those URLs.
"The domains in question are used only as mirrors for ICANN and IANA's main websites. The organizations' actual websites at icann.org and iana.org were unaffected. The redirect was noticed and corrected within 20 minutes. However, it may have taken anywhere up to 48 hours for the redirect to be entirely removed from the Internet," says ICANN in a recent statement.
The ICANN refused to name the registrar that managed the corporation's domains, but the New York Times has unveiled that it is in fact Register.com. It would seem that the attack was not aimed at the ICANN itself, but at the registrar.
"The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN's registrar's systems. A full, confidential, security report from that registrar has since been provided to ICANN with respect to this attack," ICANN further added.
ICANN will go over all its security measures and see that a similar attack does not occur again. On the 26th of June, all the people who tried to access the ICANN or IANA web pages were automatically redirected to another site where this message was posted: "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?"