Hackers briefly hijack google.com.bd
The Bangladesh page of search giant Google, Google.com.bd, was out of service for more than three hours yesterday, thanks to hackers. The social media was quick to circulate the news that the site was hacked by a Pakistani group. The Google page was apparently being redirected to a page with the message Google Bangladesh stamped by Team Pak cyber attackers. That page, however, was not show on every IP (internet protocol) address. Many saw the 404 error notice after typing the Google address. This notice indicates that the internet cannot show the selected page. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Co. Ltd (BTCL) stated that the problem with google.com.bd was solved by 2pm.
Explaining the problem, internet expert Hasib Muammar Rashid said it was a case of domain name system (DNS) cache poisoning of the .com.bd sites. DNS cache poisoning, also known as DNS spoofing, is a type of attack that exploits vulnerabilities in the DNS to divert internet traffic away from legitimate servers and towards fake ones. DNS poisoning is dangerous because it can spread from one DNS server to another, said Rashid.
With cache poisoning, an attacker tries to insert a fake address record for an internet domain into the DNS. If the server accepts the fake record, the cache is poisoned, and subsequent requests for the address of the domain are answered with the address of a server controlled by the attacker.
The main problem is that thousands of users can be redirected if an attacker successfully inserts a single fake entry into a caching server. The scale of the problem is amplified by the popularity of the domain being requested. Since Google is the most popular web address, the problem spread quickly, he explained.
Mir Mohammad Morshed, the public relations officer of BTCL, said that after detecting the problem, the BTCL team immediately took action. By 2pm, the problem was completely solved.
