Al-Jazeera hacked…almost

Thursday March 27, 2003 at 4:53 pm

After launching their English web site on Monday, Al-Jazeera has been battered by denial of service (DoS) attacks. Neither of their sites — English or Arabic — has been available since early in the week (and it's now Thursday evening). Although they denied any attacks and claimed the sites were being overloaded by viewer traffic, those reports were soon proven false. Al-Jazeera had to admit that a DoS attack was indeed being waged against their web presence. To add insult to injury, a little social engineering allowed a hacker to redirect Al-Jazeera's web site to a different address (a method called "DNS poisoning") — essentially hacking the site while leaving it physically untouched. Despite having resolved the DNS problem (but not the continued attacks), Zone-H.org was able to capture a snapshot of the "new" Al-Jazeera before it was taken down. You can view the hacked version here. A wee bit of free expression, I think.

jason

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