Yesterday morning, while many Indonesians were busy celebrating Idul Adha (The Day of Sacrifice), a group of blackhats were busy hacking the google.co.id homepage.
As shown in the screenshot above, the group claiming credit for “stamping” the site calls themselves Team MaDLeeTs (LeeT being hacker terminology for ‘elite’). The Pakistani group also claimed responsibility for hacking the Google Malaysia homepage one year ago.
People first noticed the defaced homepage, with the ominous phrase “Security is just an illusions”, around 10am and it supposedly stayed up for several hours before the domain was restored to it’s original state.
But you don’t need to worry about hackers having the power to actually break into Google’s own servers. The search giant has far better security than that.
So how did Team MaDLeeTs accomplish their digital graffiti job? Apparently through a technique known as ‘DNS poisoning.’ You can think of the Domain Name System (DNS) as the routing map of the internet – when you type google.com into your browser, DNS servers are queried and direct you to the proper site.
According to cyber security news site Techworm, a member of the MaDLeets team said they were able to hack into the official Domain Registrar of Indonesia. So essentially, they just caused the DNS system to redirect people typing google.co.id to their defaced site instead of the real Google site (which was untouched by the attack).
So while your Google Mail and browser history are safe (thank goodness), it does show that Indonesia’s internet infrastructure has some serious holes in need of plugging.
