TCS website hacked

On Sunday, visitors to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) website were taken for a hacker’s surprize as the HomePage of the website greeted visitors with a ‘For Sale’ message. It has been reported that the problem was at Domain Registrar as no servers were compromised but it was a case of DNS hijacking.

According to the wikipedia: DNS hijacking or DNS redirection is the practice of redirecting the resolution of Domain name system (DNS) names to IP addresses to rogue DNS servers, particularly for the practice of phishing, or the practice of some ISPs resolving otherwise non-existent domains to the ISPs own servers.

DNS hijacking is a kind of hacking, and is punishable under section 66 (read with section 43) of Information Technology Act, 2008.

Basically, there are two aspects to a hosted website, one is the Domain name and other is the Hosting space. It is necessary for the Domain name name – servers to point to the correct Hosting company servers by providing the required information, which is normally in the form of ns1.servername.com, etc. Such information is secured with a username and password, which is different than the normal Hosting user account information.

In many cases in India, the Domain Owners do not realize that they havn’t been provided with the access to such other Domain Control Panel but only the Hosting Cpanel by the Registrars, which leads to a kind of blackmail by the local Domain service providers in most of the cases, as such companies can later deny the transfer of Domain name to other registrars in the absence of the Secret Key, which is compulsorily required for such transfers (which is available within the Domain Control Panel).

If you have been victim of such blackmail by your Domain name registrar, please contact here for legal help !

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