Google suggests Malaysians search Canada

Web Services // Malaysia

Visitors landed at a website concocted by the alleged hackers, a group from Pakistan.

Rather than finding the normal Google search home page in Malaysia, visitors arrived at a site hosted in Canada. Both google.com.my and google.my were hijacked during the incident. Integricity, the company that manages the Google domains in Malaysia, said that the episode lasted a few hours, beginning after midnight local time.

Network World reports that "Team Madleets" claimed responsibility for the hack on Facebook. “According to the group's Facebook page, it claimed to have modified Google domains for Serbia, Kenya, Burundi and Pakistan over the last few weeks.

The country-code top level domain ".my" is administered by the Malaysia Network Information Center (MYNIC). An official contacted Friday morning said the organization was investigating a DNS (Domain Name System) attack. It wasn't immediately clear how the group performed the attack,” according to Network World.

Somehow the attackers hacked servers that control the country’s directory of Internet addresses. Visitors’ computers were thus directed to the wrong site.

“MYNIC, the company that administers the country [top level domain] for Malaysia, confirmed the attack in a statement issued Friday morning, saying that its internal incident response team had resolved the problem within a short time of learning of the attack,” Kaspersky reports.

Integricity said in a statement: “We immediately tried to log into the MYNIC reseller system to check on the status, but were unable to do so. The DNS servers for this domain have been modified and this has caused the URL to be pointed to a page that shows the site has been hacked.”

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