WHAT? Yes, you read that correctly. On August 27, 2013, The New York Times’ website crashed due to an attack on Melbourne IT, the NYT’s domain name registrar. According to ABC News, Melbourne IT released a statement that an “unknown party accessed a reseller account with a stolen ID and password and used that access to tamper with client domain names, including that of The New York Times.”
According to a tweet from an account supposedly owned by the Syrian Electronic Army, a “pro-Syrian-regime” hacker group, this attack is being claimed by the SEA. These tweets also claimed that the SEA had hacked into Huffington Post UK’s website and Twitter.com. How did they allegedly do this? By hacking into each site’s domain name server (DNS). Brian Krebs, a cyber security blogger at KrebsOnSecurity.com, was asked what a hacker could do with a DNS attack. He stated “What couldn’t you do? What DNS does is translate human-friendly domain names [like nytimes.com] into IP addresses and vice-versa. Essentially, if you hijack somebody’s domain name server or alter their information, you can control where the computer sends the user online.”
This cyber attack is a great example of why it is so important to ensure that your website is secure. Every website is at risk to being hacked. Once a website is hacked, the breach and resulting damage can potentially be spread to everyone who visits your site. You may be thinking “My site is really small and not business related. How can I spread the damage of being hacked to others? I only have a few people visiting my site.” You may be small but it is still necessary to be secure. If a hacker is able to get into your site, and then into another person’s information, that malicious attack can quickly spread to everywhere that your visitor goes. A secure password is a good start but it’s not enough. Not only do you need a secure password, it’s crucial that you change your password several times per year. For more information…