By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
June 18, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to several reports Wednesday, the main page of photo hosting site Photobucket (photobucket.com) was hijacked Tuesday afternoon by a Turkish hacking group known as “NetDevilz.”
Tuesday afternoon, some visitors to Photobucket, apparently the web’s most popular photo sharing site, were redirected to a blank gray page with a message written in Turkish that translated approximately to, “is there anyone who remembers us? We thought you forgot us and we decided to remind you again.”
According to a post on ZDNet’s “Zero Day” security blog, Photobucket users were reporting minor disruptions in their services, of the variety that would seem to indicate the attack involved a hijacking of the site’s DNS records.
The blog post also identified the NetDevilz group as the one responsible for a similar attack on the popular adult video website Redtube last month.
According to the FaceTime Security Labs blog, which also tracked the outage, Photobucket itself remained quiet about the outage, except for a message posted to the company’s support forums:
“On Tuesday afternoon, some users that typed in the Photobucket.com URL were temporarily redirected to an incorrect page due to an error in our DNS hosting services. The error was fixed within an hour of its discovery, but due to the nature of the problem, some users will not have access to Photobucket for a few hours as the fix rolls out. It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect.”
The company appears to have avoided any widespread distress among users as a result of the attack, but there is at least one blog out there criticizing Photobucket’s handling of the situation, given that the company seems to be attempting to pass of what pretty obviously appears to be the result of an attack as some kind of technical glitch.
As of Wednesday morning, the Photobucket site appeared to be operating normally.
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