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June 19, 2008 3:58 PM PDT

Register.com investigating Photobucket DNS hijack

by Elinor Mills

Register.com is looking into the hijack of Photobucket's DNS records that redirected customers to an unrelated Web page this week.

"The Photobucket site was down for a very short time and was restored immediately when we became aware of the issue." Roni Jacobson, general counsel of Register.com, said in a statement on Thursday. "We are currently investigating the source of the problem."

On Tuesday afternoon, some Photobucket customers trying to access the site were temporarily redirected to a page that appeared to have been hacked by a Turkish group calling itself "NetDevilz."

Photobucket discovered the problem within about an hour of when it started and soon thereafter began rolling out a fix. Some customers were able to access the site within a few hours, but for others it took as long as two days, according to the site.

The company is urging customers to do a DNS Flush on their computer, as well as reboot the modem and/or the router if they are still having trouble reaching the site.

"If this does not resolve the issue, please try again later, as the redirect may still be cached in your ISP's DNS files. Depending on the ISP, it may take up to 72 hours (or longer) for their DNS cache to be cleared (or for it to expire), so you should consider contacting them to see if anything can be expedited," the company said in a blog post.

In May, Comcast's DNS records and site were hijacked.

Many customers of Photobucket were unable to reach the site for anywhere from hours to days this week after the site's DNS records were hijacked.

(Credit: Photobucket)
Originally posted at Webware
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
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Add a Comment (Log in or register)
by CydeSwype June 19, 2008 4:49 PM PDT
I probably don't need to state the obvious but...this is much more serious that phishing. If someone were to hijack Wells Fargo's DNS and redirect people to a site that looked just like Wells Fargo's and then harvest the login credentials as the use logs in... they're going to fool a lot of people. There's still a lot of financial institutions out there that don't use very simple (yet effective) methods of anti-phishing, like choosing a graphic to "customize" a user's login page. ...these are scary times indeed.
Reply to this comment
by hapleng June 23, 2009 7:24 AM PDT
Thank you for good information

<a href=http://www.hapleng.com>hapleng</a>
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