Cybercrooks Nabbed After Comcast Hack

Three hackers are facing a five year jail sentence for maliciously redirecting the Comcast.net website to a corrupt page.

When Comcast customers tried to access the Comcast.net site in May 2008, they were redirected to an unknown web page which displayed a message identifying the hackers as the Kryogeniks gang. At that time about five million people connected to the site each day, according to the United States Department of Justice.

Instead of users getting the normal Comcast.net home page, the message on the page greeted customers with the message as follows:

"KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBB RoXed COMCAST sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven".

Immediately after Comcast was able to address the hack, the registrar came back to say that they did not know how the hackers managed to get the passwords necessary to switch the DNS servers and redirect the site.

The indictment has shed some light on how this hack was accomplished. It has been revealed that one of the defendants, Christopher Allen Lewis, made two phone calls to get the information that he and his friends used to access Comcast's DNS information.

The filing claims that one of the defendants, Michael Paul Nebel, allegedly logged onto a specific Comcast email account that allowed him to communicate with Comcast's DNS registrar. Lewis was then able to sign onto Comcast's account at the registrar and point the Comcast.net site to the page he and the others created.

During the attack, one of the defendants, Lewis, called a Comcast employee at his home and asked if the company's domains were working properly as the indictment alleges.

Comcast claims it lost US$128,578 during to the attacks.

James Robert Black Jr. is the third defendant named in the indictment. The men are charged with one count each of conspiracy to intentionally damage a protected computer system. The charges have been filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

If convicted they will face a five-year prison sentence and each be fined $250,000. It is time that hackers face the music. Hopefully the harsh punishment in this case will be a wake-up call to other hackers out there.