Betfair, Telegraph hit by dns attack

If you visited Betfair Sunday night for a spot of live dealer gaming, you may have unexpectedly found yourself at a very different website containing the message,

“We Turk Guvenligi declare this day as World Hackers Day – Have fun”

Visitors to Betfair and a bunch of other high profile sites were redirected to the website of hackers Turk Guvenligi after the group managed to hack domain registrar NetNames.

Other websites effected by the breach included Acer, National Geographic, The Telegraph, The Register and Vodaphone – all with their DNS records managed by NetNames.

Betfair were eager to explain today that it was not their systems that were in any way compromised.  A message at their community page read,

“It’s important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked.  Instead of managing to breach the website, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected. DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like Betfair.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered Betfair.com into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn’t under the control of Betfair.”

Access to Betfair.com was interrupted for about 3-4 hours while the DNS issue was being resolved…an eternity for a business that processes a claimed 5 million betting transactions every 24 hours.  No doubt also a tad frustrating for plenty of punters.

This is not the first time this year that high profile websites have found themselves on the receiving end of mischievous activity.  A few moths ago The Sun, CIA and PayPal were all interrupted by the Anonymous and Lulzsec hacking groups.  Two arrests were made in London on Friday in relation to these incidents…which means Scotland Yard’s website will probably be brought down in the near future!