May 29th, 2008
Comcast hack: Just a generic attack or BitTorrent revenge?
Comcast’s portal had its DNS records hi-jacked in an attack. The big question: Was Comcast just a big target or was this a BitTorrent revenge attack as some folks have speculated?
If you recall, Comcast had drawn some fire over traffic shaping on its network and curtailing peer-to-peer services. It’s pretty easy to connect this hack with that BitTorrent flap, but it may not be that simple. Dancho Danchev has pieced together his investigation (Techmeme) and it’s good play-by-play on the attack.
Dancho explains:
Further investigation into this incident reveals a connection between the group responsible for Comcast’s DNS hijacking and previous incidents such as the defacements of Justin Timberlake, Hilary Duff and Tila Tequila’s MySpace profiles. Comcast.net wasn’t hacked, its DNS records got hijacked, so whenever someone visited comcast.net, the defaced page was loading from different servers.
TorrentFreak speculates that there was some BitTorrent revenge here, but that may be a big leap to make. Sure, BitTorrent throttling was a hot topic–that was ultimately resolved in a partnership.
If anything the BitTorrent flap did make Comcast a newsworthy target but most likely some hackers just caught a large Internet player with its guard down for a bit.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Smart Planet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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