Photobucket tipped over by Turkish hacker

DNS hijack hijinks

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Software & Security, 18th June 2008 15:37 GMT

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Photobucket, the popular photo sharing website, became the target of a DNS hack on Tuesday.

As a result of the attack some (but not all) surfers hoping to check out pictures were involuntarily redirected to a greeting from hacker NetDeliz and a message in Turkish.

A post to Photobucket's user forum blamed the problem on "an error in our DNS hosting services". It stressed that users' personal information was not affected by the redirection.

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.

Security experts, such as Chris Boyd of FaceTime (here), and security bloggers (here) expressed doubts about this explanation and urged the photo sharing site to issue a clearer statement about the attack.

Media relations personnel from Photbucket weren't immediately available for comment at the time of writing, but we've put in a request for a fuller explanation of the snafu and will update this article as and when it becomes available.

Last month unidentified hackers hijacked Comcast's domain for several hours, sending subscribers who wanted to access webmail to a hacker greeting site instead. The hijinks came about after miscreants changed registration information stored on comcast.net by its domain registrar, Network Solutions. ®

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