The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Potty-mouthed hackers steal comcast.net keys, go for a spin

heystoopid

So 

Linux

So , when will the Comcast executives emails become public domain on the intertubes ?

Anonymous Coward

"dick-tard"? 

Pirate

the mind boggles

Silentmaster101

they did a bit more than that. 

i called to change some of my account settings and things, and the people i talked to said their account lookup system was having issues and wouldnt be back up for a bit, when i called again about 4 hours later it was still down, then this story breaks.....

foo_bar_baz

MX records? 

Pirate

So they redirected the website. What about MX records? It would be a lot more damaging to redirect all Comcast emails to your own address, even for a short while. I would be willing to bet most SMTP servers ignore it if the SSL certificate does not match or is missing.

Brain

how 

Pirate

i am sure this was done by a social engineering attack, someone got names and info on admins inside comcast, and then called up network solutions or faxed them a change. Quite likely if they could make the request seem authentic i bet. After all, how many people who post to this site would fall for a trick like that? This also means it is likely to be partly an inside job too :)

Tuomo Stauffer

Preventing and monitoring? 

Pirate

Preventing this kind of things happening can never be 100% but aren't they monitoring it? You would think that any company which is relying on, let's say DNS, would be monitoring that resource? Doesn't really cost anything, just a couple of messages time to time. Weird!

Robert Armstrong

All your DNS belong to us 

Paris Hilton

He who throttles others may get throttled himself.

At least, that's what Paris told me last night....

peter

Wasted opportunity 

Unhappy

Instead of redirecting to a web page, pass on the login details to both the comcast server and your own mirror. They get access as usual to mail and domain controls and you get the username/password for later use.

P. Lee

web traffic not trashed 

Coat

... just "delayed".

Mines the one with the RST flag on the sleeve.

Edward Rowley

Brute force of ssh key 

Unhappy

The box wasn't running debian was it

Anonymous Coward

I missed the fun. Just got the Network Solutions blank page. 

Unhappy

I tried to access comcast.net at about 2:00 a.m. Eastern USA time. I just got a page marked as a Network Solutions page stating that the Comcast web site was unavailable. I'm always late to the party. :(

Will

Dick Tard 

Paris Hilton

Must be el reg readers then...

Paris coz its not nice to be mean about dicks

Anonymous Coward

How come... 

Stop

...such dweebs can compromise so much?

IT Security and Army Intelligence must be on a par.

Neil Briscoe

There's an easy fix.... 

Happy

Here we have a nice division of labour. I look after our DNS, but my boss has our registry account. Most of the time, he keeps the company credit card details off our account, and whenever I have to do something with the registry account, I have to ask him to fill in the details.

Until he does, I can't do anything with the registry account at all, all I get is a page telling me that there are no credit card details available.

A rough - but efficient - protection method.

When I've finished - I let him know he can remove the card details again and the protection is back on.

Regards

Neil

Anonymous Coward

you'd think ... 

Unhappy

>> A brute force password attack is one possibility, but you'd think Network Solutions >> has safeguards in place to detect thousands of unsuccessful login attempts.

You would think that all domain registrars would have passwords encrypted ? oh look UKreg/Fasthosts didn't, so NS not having brute force detection wouldn't surprise me

Anon Koward

@Dick Tard 

Coat

I think you will find it was Dick tard lane, obviously a troll of el' reg who just couldn't figure out where tard is actually meant to fit into a sentence!

/mines the coat with "L33t Tard Warez" on it...

Anonymous Coward

Comcast doesn't really need much help screwing up 

I've had comcast for ages mainly because they've forgotten us on their rate increases so we hum along at some old cheap rate. The second they try to raise my rate we'll be running for the door.

But Comcrap doesn't really need a whole lot of help screwing up their network - they do it all by themselves, ALL THE TIME. At any point in time half of the intarweb can't be located. There was some sort of outage in the area last weekend that left something like 140,000 households without service for a few hours. Bittorrents downloads do finish but forget about seeding due to their session rejects.

Posting anonymously as I don't want those clowns to find me and "fix" my billing.