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Hackers deface New Zealand sites

Hackers appearing to hail from Turkey have struck a number of high profile New Zealand sites belonging to large multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Xerox and F-Secure.
Written by Juha Saarinen, Contributor

Hackers appearing to hail from Turkey have struck a number of high profile New Zealand sites belonging to large multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Xerox and F-Secure.

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One of the images used by the hackers (Credit: Mirrored by Zone-H)

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 like "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 didn't 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 wasn't aware of how many domains had been compromised by the hackers.

More to follow.

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