Hack Attack

CableFAXexperienced the hack on Comcast‘s portal first hand Thurs. When our editor tried to access her Comcast email just after midnight ET, she was greeted with hacker graffiti—"KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven." Rut-roh. While she took it as an omen to go to bed, Comcast employees were roused from sleep to deal with the mess. The MSO, which has more than 14mln HSD subs, said customers who tried to access Comcast.net between 11:30pm ET Wed to 2am ET Thurs were impacted, although some subs (including Cfax’seditor) were still having problems Thurs morning. So what happened? Law enforcement officials are investigating, but essentially users attempting to access the site were redirected to another site by an unauthorized person. "We believe that our registration information at the vendor that registers the Comcast.net domain address was altered, which redirected the site, and is the root cause of today’s continued issues as well," a Comcast spokesman said Thurs. Like many, Comcast uses Network Solutions as its vendor, so the hackers altered the DNS servers that were used for Comcast.net requests. We wound up at an IP address in Germany at one point while trying to access the site. Comcast stopped the traffic to other servers, but it could take a while for the redirected traffic to transmit through DNS servers throughout the Internet. That’s likely why some folks were still having trouble accessing the site Thurs. As for security concerns, the MSO has seen no evidence at this point that any customer or account info was lost or compromised.