Some dose of adrenaline on the streets of Tripoli
As you are probably aware of, there is heavy fighting going on the streets of the Libyan capital Tripoli right now. As of today there is no telephone connection with the city.
By a silly joke, Ali Monder, an alleged fighter, has replaced only one file on the official web page of the nic.ly web site:
with defaced
The rest of nic.ly site functions normally, e.g., http://nic.ly/whois.php and all other pages work well, except for the home page of nic.ly.
Of course this raises some concerns among .LY users.
Let us assure .LY community that this is only a bad joke, caused by natural overdose of adrenaline in these exceptional circumstances, and by no means a real threat to the .LY zone for the following reasons.
First of all, only one page of nic.ly site was defaced.
Secondly, the root servers that actually store the information about the other .ly sites are not compromised.
As was published earlier by Hootsuite, there are five .LY root servers, two located in Libya, two in the U.S., and one in Europe.
HootSuite .LY infographic {click on the image to zoom in}
The root servers located in the LTT building were off and on during the last six months since the war broke out. When they are cut of the Internet, as they were in the past on many occasions, the rest of the world is still using the other three servers located in the safe locations on other continents to acquire information about requested .LY sites.
In fact, unless, you are geographically close to Tripoli, i.e., in Africa, your computer would not normally acquire DNS date via the Tripoli root servers, but rather via those closer to you.
The defaced page will be removed as soon as the order is restored on the streets of Tripoli, and LTT building returns to its normal routine, so that the registry staff can gain access to the server that is hosting nic.ly web site.
We will keep you informed about the progress. Please tune in to this blog and .LY fan page on Facebook for the timely updates on the matter.
All references [1 - 6]
Short link: http://name.ly/~H1SK$BE
Live updated from the streets of Tripoli: http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al-jazeera-english-english
This story actually has a bitter continuation.
The article was republished on http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/domains/126924/
Then few moments later, the site was redefaced again… with some silly chat. Awful.
Comments for the original article were as follows:
Looks like some hackers read Habr and then cracked already cracked site. Shame the situation is not easy on the streets of Tripoli to wish for quick resolution of this mess.
There was another post mortem article this morning about the matter:
However, the hackers got really pissed with Habr, and as they have promissed started a DDoS attack and put the site down.
Shame, that so much energy and electrons get wasted.
As of yesterday, the situation has been normalised, and the home page is back to normal.
A propos, Indian registry was hacked too: http://tech2.in.com/news/general/nic-servers-and-indian-army-official-website-hacked/224452