Google.co.ma, the Moroccon domain occupied by search engine giants Google, was temporarily whipped from within their control by a group of hackers on Saturday May 9th. It appears their only motive was to show it could be done, and bask in hacker glory at having had the skills to do it.
Pakistan hackers from pakbugs.com left their forum aliases on the google.co.ma homepage, along with a message congratulating themselves. The cyber coup lasted long enough for screenshots to be taken, but the site was relatively quickly re-assumed by Google, who are unsure how it happened.
It is alleged that hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and specifically went after the Google domain which was, once taken over, pointed to a different server and left showing the hackers’ calling card. Moroccon users who tried to access their local Google were re-directed to Google.com until the embarrassing issue was resolved.
Rumour has it that this isn’t the first time Google has found itself victim of internet crime, with Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico also falling under the command of some ‘net miscreants recently.
It seems nothing is safe, even the internet’s most dominant force.
13 May 2009 08:50