The controversial Middle Eastern news service was the victim of a domain hijacking. The actual defacement appeared on a free Web site service provided by NetWorld Connections. Technically known as a "redirect," the hack causes Web browsers that attempt to go to www.aljazeera.net--as well as the English site--to be surreptitiously redirected to the content hosted on NetWorld's servers.
The service detected a spike in traffic early in the morning, and an e-mail from a security specialist confirmed that visitors to Al-Jazeera were being redirected to NetWorld's service, said Ken Bowman, CEO of the Salt Lake City company.
"We pulled down the content immediately," Bowman said. He added that VeriSign, which administers the domain registry, eliminated the redirect later in the morning. "They never even touched (Al-Jazeera's) site," he said.
A representative of VeriSign couldn't immediately answer questions regarding how the domain had been hijacked.
VeriSign maintains the Internet registry for the .com, .net, .cc and .tv top-level domains and administers the authoritative database for all domain names registered in those top-level domains. The domain hijacking may have corrupted Al-Jazeera's record in the VeriSign's database.
The defacement is the latest in a flurry of activity surrounding the Middle Eastern news service.
Al-Jazeera has had to contend with both technical problems and attacks this entire week. The Arab satellite TV network launched its English-language Web site on Monday, attracting significant media coverage. The site hosts the station's controversial video coverage, which has included images of US soldiers killed and taken prisoner.
The controversy and resulting media coverage has also made the site a target of a number of online miscreants.
"Let Freedom Ring!" stated Thursday's defacement, featuring a large American flag and signed by a vandal with the handle "Patriot" and claiming to be part of a group called the Freedom Cyber Force Militia. "GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!!!"
NetWorld's Bowman said the site had been created using a free hosting service that the company offers. He also explained that, because the service is free, the company doesn't keep very rigorous watch on the activities.
"All the supplied information was fictitious," he said, quashing any possibility of aiding in a law enforcement investigation. "It's is a free site, so we don't track any data. We don't track the Internet addresses or anything else. It would take a staff of about 500 to do so."
Bowman said they are analysing what happened and may change the way the free portion of the site is administered to prevent future incidents.
One security expert familiar with the defacement scene said that he had never heard of a group called Freedom Cyber Force Militia.
"We didn't hear about many other defacers who hacked right (before) the war," the administrator of Zone-H.org, a popular security and defacement news site, said in an e-mail interview. "I guess a lot of IT (security) professionals took the chance of this war to remove some rust from their fingers," said the administrator, who goes by the handle SyS64738.
