The popular classifieds website Craigslist is back online today following a DNS attack that forced it offline for several hours Sunday evening.
According to a blogpost Sunday night by Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster, DNS records maintained at one of Craigslist’s domain registrars were compromised shortly after 5 p.m. PST, and in turn, redirected unsuspecting visitors to non-Craigslist sites.
One of the sites that users were sent to was DigitalGangster[dot]com, which was offline most of Monday presumably because of the amount of traffic that Craigslist has sent to it over the last 24 hours. The site is back online now, but mostly unresponsive. Members of the DigitalGangster, which serves as a forum of sorts for hackers, took credit for compromising the Twitter accounts of Bill O’Reilly, Britney Spears, etc. in 2009.
Buckmaster claims the DNS issue has since been corrected but that many Internet service providers still have the bogus DNS information cached and that some still have incorrect information.
DNS hijacking, usually excuted via phishing or social engineering, is a type of malicious attack that essentially trumps a computer’s TCP/IP settings to direct it to a rogue DNS server.
