May 29, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — US telco Comcast’s web portal Comcast.net (comcast.net) was hacked into and taken offline for a few hours Wednesday night, leaving the company’s 14.1 million subscribers unable to access their emails, news and technical support.
According to reports appearing on BroadbandReports.com and its forums, the front page of Comcast.net went down shortly before 11 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and was replaced by a note saying: “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast. sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.”
Broadband Reports says it seems the hackers got into Comcast’s domain registrar account at web hosting provider Network Solutions, changed the authoritative DNS servers for Comcast.net and redirected portal visitors to IP addresses in Germany and other foreign locations.
Comcast says the “hijacking” was reversed by late Thursday morning but some users were still unable to access Comcast.net and their webmail. It is also believed that emails or any other private information was not compromised by the attack.
The company says it has alerted the authorities about the issue and is working in conjunction with them.
In recent months, Comcast has been one of the telcos deeply involved in the debate on “net neutrality,” the regulatory conversation in which carriers argue they should be allowed to prioritize traffic, or to charge content sites a premium for more reliable delivery of their content.
Much of the desire to prioritize traffic among carriers comes from an opposition to bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer file transfer applications like bittorrent, which are also popular vehicles for piracy.
Earlier this month, we reported that Comcast may be considering placing transfer limits on its Internet subscriber accounts.
It is certainly possible that the company’s desire to police its data network in this way has made it a bit of a target for attacks, and may have led to the site being “RoXed.”
