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Cable and Internet giant Comcast Corporation found itself on the receiving end of a concentrated online attack late last week when disgruntled teenage hackers claiming to be from the group ‘Kryogeniks’ hijacked the Comcast Web mail portal and caused user chaos for the Philadelphia-based business.
Hacker duo whack Comcast across the kneecaps due to "s****y service". Image: Comcast.
Effects of the attack lasted for more than five hours on Wednesday evening, breaching around 200 domain names, crippling the service, redirecting site traffic, and preventing users from accessing their personal e-mail accounts.
Anyone attempting to land on the site was instead shuffled to another site created by the hackers, which delivered the message: “KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.”
And the proffered reasoning behind the Web mail attack? In a telephone interview given to Kevin Poulsen of Wired Magazine, hackers Defiant and EBK described their actions as a direct consequence of Comcast’s “shitty service.”
“Comcast is just a huge corporation,” said EBK, “and we wanted to take them out, and we did.”
The hacking duo say that they used a combination of social engineering and a Network Solutions control panel exploit in order to gain access to Comcast’s domain settings. The pair apparently stayed up all night opening more than 50 new Webhosting accounts in order to successfully carry Comcast’s redirected subscriber traffic.
Regardless of any user-based agreement that can be afforded to the hackers and their personal grievances against Comcast, the pair now face a potential clamp down by the FBI, which has been drafted in alongside the San Jose police to locate the attackers, reveal their true identities, and bring them to heel for the disruption.
Various reports suggest that both Defiant and EBK are well versed when it comes to working with Kryogeniks to initiate such attacks. Industry watchers at DailyTech claim the pair’s hacker names have also been linked to prior assaults on the likes of Internet titan AOL along with various well-known celebrities.
Following the temporary disruption, Comcast Corp. said that most of its inbound traffic was finding its way back to the Web mail portal by Thursday.
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