Domain Spats & Disputes

Two hackers highjacked the comcast.net domain in May, hacking into the domain’s registrar account and changing the DNS settings for the domain — which took down the ISP giant’s website and knocked out its webmail services for more than five hours.

According to the report in Wired, the hackers used a combination of technical hacking and social engineering to break into Comcast’s account with Network Solutions, which gave them access to change the nameservers for the comcast.net domain. A Network Solutions representative denied that NetSol’s system was compromised.

In gaining access to Comcast’s NetSol account, the hackers gained control of more 200 domain names in the account. They changed the contact information for comcast.net to the e-mail address of one of the hackers; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room” at “69 Dick Tard Lane.”