Sites including Vodafone, UPS and The Daily Telegraph all experienced hacking attacks from online Turkish activists on Sunday. The hacks were all directed towards the sites because they hold on to user’s information. Every visitor to each of the sites was redirected to the hacker’s own site.
The hackers focused their attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) which acts as an online address book. It actively changes the urls and names of sites into numbers that computers can translate. By attacking the DNS the hackers changed the records that were in relation to the seven sites they wanted to attack.
The group, Turkguvenligi, revealed that they gained access to the sites through the use of an SQL injection. According to the collective this is the easiest method to attack the sites effectively. However, despite their attempts it appears that no data was compromised from any of the seven sites they targeted. Commenting on this a Turkguvenligi spokesperson said: “The hardest one is reaching the domain company but if you can succeed there will be a treasure for you.”
The attack was carried out on sites that were part of either NetNames or Ascio DNS databases. Both of these companies are subsidiaries of domain management specialists Group NBT. The company commented on the attacks by saying: “While no-one can completely defend against such sustained and concentrated malicious attacks we will continue to review our systems to ensure that we provide our customers a solid, robust and above all secure service.”
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