Telstra White Pages Online temporarily became the gateway to one of cyberspace's red light districts this morning.
It appears that pranksters conspired to redirect the site's traffic to a pornography portal.
Users who attempted to access the online telephone directory around 10.30 am E.S.T. found themselves in a sticky situation, viewing an explicit image of senior citizens engaged in an act of sexual congress.
At this stage, it appears that the problem only affected customers of South Australia-based Internet Service Provider, Internode.
John Harris of South Australia-based Impress Media, who found himself unexpectedly redirected to the online porn venue, said that the situation required immediate and thorough investigation, despite the nature of the material it would expose him to.
He said his exhaustive investigation unearthed some "asian lovelies" but, alas, no answer to the mysterious re-direct.
"It's a legitimate excuse to check out a porn site," he said.
A disappointed Harris said his investigation was brought to an end after the site requested his credit card details.
South Australian Government employee Damon Wynne also seemed more amused rather than annoyed when he found himself in similar circumstances to Harris this morning. He believes that a socially engineered infiltration rather than a conventional network attack lies behind the malady.
According to Wynne, the perpetrator probably contacted Internode under the guise of an authorised White Pages Online employee and simply asked for the site's DNS records to be changed.
According to sources close to Internode executives, the ISP has recently experienced security breaches similar to those affecting White Pages Online today. The source said that at least one executive would be -raising hell" about this should Internode be found to be responsible.
Telstra, White Pages Online's service provider, said that enquiries it placed with the site's administrator, Pacific Access, revealed nothing.
Earlier today, a spokesperson for Pacific Access told ZDNet Australia that they were investigating the problem but later declined to comment on the incident.
Harris and Wynne both said that the redirection was corrected soon after they discovered it.
For comparison, Wynne pointed to examples of other companies that have been targeted for similar, but politically motivated attacks in the past. In June 2000 'hack-tivists' redirected Nike.com to Australia-based activist site s11.org.
Thus far, there appears to be no motive for the recent attack on the White Pages site apart from schoolboy-ish fun.
Internode was contacted for comment on this report.
FYI - I am not a Gov't employee.
Still it was pretty amusing regardless to go to look up an address and get "smooth ****" dot com instead hahaha...