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Hackers hijack DNS records of high profile New Zealand sites

Remember the DNS hijackings of such high profile sites such as Comcast, Photobucket, and ICANN/IANA domains that were taking place last year? Similar incidents are still happening.
Written by Dancho Danchev, Contributor

Remember the DNS hijackings of such high profile sites such as Comcast, Photobucket, and ICANN/IANA domains that were taking place last year? Similar incidents are still happening.

Today, a web site defacement group known as "The Peace Crew" has successfully hijacked the DNS records for high profile New Zealand web sites, through what Zone-H claims to be a SQL injection at New Zealand's based registrar Domainz.net, in order to redirect the visitors to a defaced page featuring the infamous Bill Gates pieing photo, as well as anti-war messages.

The mass defacement affected major Microsoft sites in New Zealand including WindowsLive.co.nz, MSN.co.nz, Microsoft.co.nz, Hotmail.co.nz, Live.co.nz next to HSBC.co.nz, Sony.co.nz, Coca-Cola.co.nz, Xerox.co.nz, Fanta.co.nz, F-Secure.co.nz and BitDefender.co.nz.

Here's Microsoft's comment:

According to NZHerald:

"MSN have responded by issuing a short statement from MSN business manager Liz Fraser this afternoon. "The cause of this discrepancy has been identified and we are currently working with our Microsoft technology and security teams in the US to resolve the matter as quickly as possible today. "We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused," the statement said."

Once control to the domain registrar's web panel was obtained, members of the Peace Crew used fatih1.turkguvenligi .info and fatih2.turkguvenligi .info as primary DNS servers delivering the defaced pages, and making it look like the sites themselves have been compromised.

The group is not new on the defacement scene, in fact one of its members has been keeping himself pretty busy during this month by having already defaced thirteen web servers belonging to NASA, using the same template.

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