» Feds Charge 3 With Comcast.net Hijacking

[MaXe]

Three alleged members of the hacker gang Kryogeniks were hit with a federal
conspiracy charge Thursday for a 2008 stunt that replaced Comcast’s
homepage with a shout-out to other hackers.

Prosecutors identified Christopher Allen Lewis, 19, and James Robert Black Jr.,
20, as the hackers “EBK” and “Defiant,” known for hijacking Comcast’s domain
name in May of last year — a prank that took down the cable giant’s
homepage and webmail service for more than five hours, and allegedly cost
the company over $128,000.

Visitors to Comcast.net had been redirected to a simple page reading
“KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock
elul21 coll1er seven.”

A third man, Michael Paul Lebel, 28, was also charged with helping the duo,
though his alleged handle “Slacker” was not credited in the defacement message.




As described in the indictment (.pdf), the hackers got control of the domain
with two phone calls, and an e-mail sent to the company’s domain registrar,
Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast e-mail account.
That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast’s 200 domains.
In an interview the day after the attack, Defiant and EBK told Threat Level
that they didn’t initially set out to redirect the site’s traffic. Instead, they
merely changed the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to
Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room”
at “69 Dick Tard Lane.”

Then, the hackers said, they contacted Comcast’s original technical
contact at his home number to tell him what they’d done. It was only when
the Comcast manager scoffed at their claim and hung up on them, that EBK
decided to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site’s traffic to
servers under the hackers’ control.

“I was trying to say we shouldn’t do this the whole damn time,” said Defiant last year.
“But once we were in,” added EBK, “it was, like, **** it.”
The indictment confirms that the hackers phoned the Comcast official at home.
In the interview last year, the hackers expressed some shock over the
attention the attack garnered.

“The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it
would,” said Defiant, who said he was 19 years old, and that his first name
was James. “I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be
really bad.”


Thanks to the Wired Magazine for publishing this article.

References:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/comcast-hack/


All of the best,
MaXe

[SirCapsAlot]

Holy CRAP!!! thatis insane.......makes sense though...take control of someones namespace servers and you're all set! That is crazy... Very good article to share MaXe !

[MaXe]

No problem, I think the original article might be here somewhere still :-)

[#Kr0w]

I know hacking a cable company's website probably isn't something that most people who admire, but I still think it takes some level of genius to do, so I am impressed. Maybe one day I will possess the skills to do this, though I probably won't use my skills for the same goals. :P

[MaXe]

If I remember correct, they used Dan Karminsky's DNS exploit which was developed by HD Moore and |)ruid, what a hack? :-)