Hundreds of Pakistani sites diverted after domain hack

Turkish hackers managed to divert the domain name system (DNS) entries for several hundred Pakistani sites in the .pk top-level domain over the weekend, 

On Saturday, Pakistani programmer Irfan Ahmad listed some 110 sites in the .pk TLD that had been subverted.

These included several high-profile ones, such as Google, Microsoft, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco domains which had their authoritative nameservers records changed to ones at US webhost freehostia.com.

The attack is thought to have been carried out by Turkish hackers Eboz, with the total number of sites diverted being as high as 285.

No reason was given for the attack by Eboz and as of Sunday, most of the sites affected by the hack were operating normally again.

What visitors to msn.org.pk saw on Saturday

The sites in question are managed by MarkMonitor, a Reuters-Thompson owned company that provides domain management as well as brand protection and there is speculation that its account with the Pakistan Network Information Centre (PKNIC) may have been compromised.

MarkMonitor is also part of the United States six-strikes anti-filesharing initative set up by rights holders and ISPs which is expected to come into effect later this year.

In 2010, MarkMonitor acquired DtecNet, the Danish anti-piracy company that supplied evidence in the courtroom stoush between ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) last year.

The company has yet to comment on the mass hack.