AL JAZEERA WEB SITE IS HACKED
By LAUREN BARACK
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March 28, 2003 --
Hackers swarmed the English version of the Al Jazeera Web site yesterday.
Instead of the Arabic news service appearing, Web surfers were redirected to a site with a U.S. flag with the words "Let Freedom Ring," in an apparent domain hijacking yesterday.
"This is a very simple and very powerful hack," said Lance Spitzner, a security architect with Sun Microsystems, and a member of The Honeynet Project, which studies hackers.
"If I wanted to hack an organization, this is the ultimate way to hack an organization. It's very dangerous."
In this type of attack, hackers gain actual control of a domain name - even of the e-mail that is being sent to that address.
Although rare, this kind of "classic" hack has happened in the past and is considered far more sophisticated than a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, which floods a server with thousands of demands until the system is overloaded, or even a DNS poisoning attack, which hijacks just the site to a different Web page.
Al Jazeera launched their English-language Web site on Monday and almost immediately the site became a victim of a DOS attack.
VeriSign, which registered the Web site name, admitted the mistake that allowed the site to be taken over yesterday.
"An error occurred and someone got administrative control of the domain name and redirected the servers," said Brian O'Shaughnessy, spokesman for VeriSign.
Al Jazeera has come under fire for showing images of U.S. soldiers who have been taken hostage and killed.Link to the picture put up!
By LAUREN BARACK
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 28, 2003 --
Hackers swarmed the English version of the Al Jazeera Web site yesterday.
Instead of the Arabic news service appearing, Web surfers were redirected to a site with a U.S. flag with the words "Let Freedom Ring," in an apparent domain hijacking yesterday.
"This is a very simple and very powerful hack," said Lance Spitzner, a security architect with Sun Microsystems, and a member of The Honeynet Project, which studies hackers.
"If I wanted to hack an organization, this is the ultimate way to hack an organization. It's very dangerous."
In this type of attack, hackers gain actual control of a domain name - even of the e-mail that is being sent to that address.
Although rare, this kind of "classic" hack has happened in the past and is considered far more sophisticated than a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, which floods a server with thousands of demands until the system is overloaded, or even a DNS poisoning attack, which hijacks just the site to a different Web page.
Al Jazeera launched their English-language Web site on Monday and almost immediately the site became a victim of a DOS attack.
VeriSign, which registered the Web site name, admitted the mistake that allowed the site to be taken over yesterday.
"An error occurred and someone got administrative control of the domain name and redirected the servers," said Brian O'Shaughnessy, spokesman for VeriSign.
Al Jazeera has come under fire for showing images of U.S. soldiers who have been taken hostage and killed.Link to the picture put up!