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Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
Syrian Electronic Army Hijacks New York Times Website
I wondered what was wrong with the Times site earlier today; now we know the reason.
I'm not sure I believe Westin's comment about the risks posed to NY Times readers from this event. This was an attack against the Domain Name System, so that nytimes.com was redirected to the SEA site in Russia. That's a lot different from breaking into the site and grabbing its database. I suppose someone who tried to subscribe might have handed over credit card information to the Syrians, but I don't think it affected even someone like me who posts fairly regularly in the Comments sections.
Comments still seem to be offline though the site is back up. I am a bit disturbed that the IP address I get for www.nytimes.com, 170.149.172.130, does not have "reverse" resolution set up. Asking for the host name associated with that address brings up a "not found" result. I never checked to see whether the Times had correct forward and reverse resolution configured before the hack, so perhaps they have just never bothered. That's pretty poor Internet engineering on their part if true.
I guess we were "at risk," to use Westin's term, of reading bogus material instead of the legitimate content, but I'd bet the English compositional skills of these guys don't measure up to the level of NYT reporters.
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In e.g. online banking they would use certificates to allow the user to better detect a phishing attack. I do not know how costly these certificates are, but maybe news sites could use it too. Then again... besides the publicity such targets are pretty useless.
If you want to see what shit is really going on in the world, take a plc connect it to the internet and let it mimick some component of a water plant or power plant. I promise you, you do not have to wait long for the first attack (matter of a week or less).
