14 DAY TRIAL // TechCrunch, one of the largest online news sites that offers the latest on technology, is either selling its subdomains or someone forcefully took them over and set them up to display a website that advertises a company called Black Oak Asset Management.
Black Oak doesn’t seem to have a website of its own, all the links provided by search engines leading to social media accounts that don’t offer many details. Even more, a Google search shows that their main website is hosted on TechCrunch subdomains.
Subdomains such as primaries.techcrunch.com and technews.techcrunch.com host the company’s webpages, including a Media, Services, Calculations and a Contact page.
We’ve tried to reach TechCrunch representatives on Twitter to find out more details, but at the time of writing we haven't heard back.
This may also be a DNS configuration issue. If so, WordPress is responsible for the error, or hack, since they handle TechCrunch’s nameservers. Another scenario would be a fault on their hosting provider's side (although a very peculiar one to be fair).
This wouldn’t be the first time TechCrunch got hacked. Back in January 2010 hackers altered the site’s homepage to display a link that pointed to illegal content.
At the time, the website was breached twice in 24 hours by a hacker who seemed to have a personal vendetta against the technology blog.
Stay tuned to find out more.
Update. It has turned out that TechCrunch was not hacked and the incident was not a result of a weird way to protest against SOPA, instead it was all an IP mix-up. Here is the site’s statement regarding the matter: In the past, we had our own test server on this IP (hosted at MediaTemple) for those subdomains (technews, primaries and so on). We have long stopped using MT as our hosting provider.
It seems that the IP is now used by someone else, Black Oak in this case. I believe this is what happened since the subdomains have existed for a long time and no one likely noticed the change of IP ownership.
I have deleted the DNS mappings for the subdomains in question.