Hackers appearing to hail from Turkey have struck a number of high-profile New Zealand sites belonging to companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Xerox and F-Secure.
Microsoft's main site was defaced, together with the sites for MSN, Windows Live, Hotmail and MSDN.
The sites have been defaced with political messages such as 'Stop the war Israel' and the hackers' online nicknames. At this stage, it is not known if any user data, such as Hotmail emails, was compromised by the hackers.
A Microsoft New Zealand spokesperson referred media queries about the attack to MSN's PR agency, but offered no further comment. The hacked copies of the sites are being mirrored at Zone-H.
An industry source that made ZDNet.com.au aware of the hacks pointed out that all the domains in question were registered via Domainz, a subsidiary of MelbourneIT.
The source believed the hackers were able to inject name server records for the domains in question through Domainz. Looking up the IP address for the injected name server record showed that the system in question is hosted at leaseweb.com in the Netherlands.
Domainz, however, said it did not know yet how the hack was done, but a manager told ZDNet.com.au that the company was aware of the attacks and is looking into it. The manager was not aware of how many domains had been compromised by the hackers.
Talkback
hmm, this sounds like a very familiar story...
a few months ago, an admittedly less high-profile site (for a London-based nightclub, since you ask...) was hacked by what seems like a very similar group of (Turkish) hackers.
whilst that hack didn't cause too much bother (defaced front page, etc), it was the subsequent hack (by al quaeda, allegedly!) that caused more significant damage.
Lets hope that these companies are prepared for some more serious attentions from undesirables - no doubt the hackers have already been boasting elsewhere of their exploits, & this news raises the profile of the hacks some more...
Al Quaeda you say? Have you got a link to that familiar news story? Or did is it just common knowledge at your local?
Cheers for the heads up though. I 100% agree the two incidents are probably related.
haha! the al quaeda link was never conclusively proven, and appears to have been news only to those of us who frequent the club & its website.
Looking at the link in the news story (above) it looks like exactly the same work that was carried out in the 1st hack on the club site.
what's slightly worrying is that these are very high profile companies being hacked - at least a small London-based club might be excused for having lower security on their web-servers (although they do collect some members details, so have to apply at least some security), but Microsoft?!?