Day: September 4, 2011

The sites themselves weren’t hacked, but the DNS entries were mis-directed on some popular web sites, such as: The Register, The Daily Telegraph, and UPS.

DNS hack hits popular websites: Telegraph, Register, UPS, etc

“Popular websites including The Register, The Daily Telegraph, UPS, and others have fallen victim to a DNS hack that has resulted in visitors being redirected to third-party webpages.

Part of the message reads:

TurkGuvengligi – ‘Gel Babana’ – HACKED – ‘h4ck1n9 is not a cr1m3’

‘4 Sept. We TurkGuvenligi declare this day as World Hackes Day – Have fun ;) h4ck y0u’

(In fact, this kind of vandalism IS a crime.)

Further websites which have been affected include National Geographic, BetFair and Acer.

It’s important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked, although to web visitors there is little difference in what they experience – a webpage under the control of hackers.

Instead of managing to breach the website, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected.

DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn’t under the control of those websites.

Because of the way that DNS works, it may take some time for corrected DNS entries for the affected websites to propagate worldwide – meaning there could be problems for some hours ahead.

In many ways we have to be grateful that the message displayed appears to be graffiti, rather than an attempt to phish information from users or install malware.”

One common thing appears to be that the affected sites were registered via NetNames… the vendor has had no comment on this as of yet.

Ahem! Well, I suppose there are some uses for it. If you don’t mind the slight illegality of downloading and viewing video off the torrents, that is!

World’s First BitTorrent Certified Digital TV Launches

“The world’s first Digital TV with ‘BitTorrent inside’ will be presented to the public tomorrow at the IFA trade show for consumer electronics in Berlin. The TV is manufactured by Vestel and uses technology from BitTorrent Inc. that allows consumers to find, download and play their favorite digital media directly on their television.

Early 2011 BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the popular file-sharing client uTorrent, launched a new all-in-one ecosystem for BitTorrent-certified products codenamed Chrysalis.

By using a certified application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

Today BitTorrent Inc. and TV manufacturer Vestel announce the launch of the first digital TV that will come with this built-in BitTorrent support. By embedding BitTorrent technology directly into the the TV hardware the two companies hope to appeal to a wide audience of people who are looking for an even more simple way to enjoy downloaded content in their living room.”