June 27, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A group of Turkish hackers calling themselves "NetDevilz" defaced on Thursday the official sites of Internet governing bodies Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (iana.org) and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann.org), according to researchers (zone-h.org/content/view/14973/30/).
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The group claimed responsibility for the attack, which momentarily redirected visitors of the IANA and ICANN websites on Thursday morning, said researchers at security firm, Zone-H.
The defacement follows ICANN's news on Thursday that it has eased up on its TLD rules by approving the offering of endless domain name endings.
Internet users that plugged in the iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net addresses into their browser toolbars were automatically sent to an illegitimate site that displayed the message:
"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?"
Zone-H took a screen capture of the defaced site, which can be viewed here:
Though it could be deemed as harmless in the grand scheme of things, the hacking arguably makes the Internet organizations look bad when considering that IANA and ICANN are collectively responsible for the Internet's overall infrastructure.
IANA manages the domain name system root zone and assigns the DNS operators for the Internet's top-level domains, which translates the domains and URLs into IP addresses.
Equally as important, ICANN oversees IANA, as well as allocates IP address space and manages the Internet's TLD naming system.
