Hot Trends watch: Comcast hack questions asked, answered

Check out Google's Hot Trends today (click thumbnail at right for full screenshot). By my count, fully 19 of the HT 100 are references to Comcast's e-mail Web site.  If you count #62 ("what happened") then it's exactly 20%...

A message thread at DSLreports has a chronicle of the problem --which Comcast.net service reps apparently said at first was "routine maintenance." Someone on the forum also posted the following screenshot displaying digital graffiti, which was what users saw when they tried to access the comcast.net home page. This clearly qualifies as a hack.

Comcast has acknowledged the security compromise in a statement, the salient parts of which follow:

“Last night users attempting to access Comcast.net were temporarily 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. We have alerted law enforcement authorities and are working in conjunction with them.”

The statements adds that Comcast has "no evidence that any customer account information or data has been lost or compromised."

To translate, this means the locus of the problem was not on Comcast's side per se, but rather with their domain resgistrar -- in this case, Network Solutions. The idea being that someone -- the name of hacker group "kryogenics" was part of the graffiti -- managed to access Comcast's registration account -- the one that controls which server a given address points to, and changed the setting so comcast.net temporarily pointed to the second, renegade site.

At the time of this writing, the site was still having problems -- instead of a graphical page, comcast.net was all text.  Personally, I'll be sticking with my Incredimail account for situation-critical communications.

Comments

[Joel Beach]

As of Friday Morning, 8:50 EST Comcast.net remains down. I just had an online chat with a service representative who says "there is ongoing system maintenance with Comcast.net" This is the second day it has been down. This seems like a big deal to me.