Comcast: How Two Teenage High School Dropouts Hacked Comcast
Posted on: May 31, 2008
A couple days ago, a pair of teenagers brought down Comcast’s homepage and mail service. They haven’t been arrested (yet), so they gave the full story to Wired. Like most nuclear-level hacks, they didn’t intend to hijack the website and mail hosting of the biggest cable company in the country. They say they even tried to warn Comcast. But, “once we were in,” said EBK, the younger of the two, “it was, like, fuck it.” Here’s how it went down, in a nutshell.
On Tuesday, Defiant and EBK (19 and 18 years old, respectively) say they exploited a flaw to hack into Network Solutions, a domain registrar, to take control of Comcast’s domain management console and 200 of its domain names. (Network Solutions denies the flaw.) To start, they relocated Comcast.net’s technical contact to the Dildo Room at 69 Dick Tard Lane, and then got a hold of the actual dude to let him know what they’d done. He hung up on them, which is when the shit hit the fan.
EBK then decided to reroute all of Comcast.net’s traffic to their own servers, so users got the delightful message, “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast. sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” They spent the rest of the night frantically opening webhosting accounts—50 in all—to handle all the traffic. After around 6 hours under their control, Comcast got the domain back, but some users still didn’t have email for hours after that.
They’re still waiting for the (probably inevitable) legal repercussions. Check out the whole thing over at Wired, it’s a good read. [Wired]
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