After shakily surviving nearly a week of intense shelling in Baghdad, the Web site of the Iraq government has apparently fallen prey to hackers. Since Wednesday, some visitors to Uruklink.net have been surprised with a red-white-and-blue message that reads, “Hacked, tracked, and NOW owned by the USA.” Others have been greeted with error messages. In fact, Uruklink, the homepage of Saddam Hussein, as well as the Iraqi News Agency and several other government organizations, is still generally available by browsing directly to the site’s numeric address. But because of an apparent attack on the site’s domain name server, some visitors who type www.uruklink.net into their browsers are being shunted off to a third-party, 9-11 memorial site, alneda.com. An examination of Uruklink’s DNS server, nic1.baghdadlink.net, revealed that the domain’s “A” record had been changed to 65.89.91.148, the IP address for alneda.com. The attackers also changed the domain’s Hostmaster address in the DNS server to read “[email protected].” According to Scott Perry, operator of the DNSStuff.com site, ns1.baghdadlink.net is running an outdated version of the BIND DNS software, which has a number of known security issues. Attackers made no apparent changes directly to the Uruklink web server. A second DNS server for Uruklink, nic2.baghdadlink.net, has been offline for nearly a week. Full Story
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