Comcast yesterday suffered an outage via a hacker attack on the Companies’ Web portal. For a few hours, people saw a message on how they “RoXed” Comcast. The hijacking came when hackers took over the Comcast.net domain via Network Solutions.
Now before you go blaming Network Solutions on this, remember – you are only as secure as your password. If I have a password of JeffPowers or JeffPowers1, I would expect it to get hacked in minutes. However, if I have a password of Jefftype$well1, it’s a little more secure – not because I put in a $, but because I put two to three words together.
Network Solutions has a different ID system – you don’t have a username, you have an ID number. Makes it harder to determine what is where. But still, if you don’t have a good password, then the ID means nothing.
I am not sure if that is the case – I am just speculating. In this day and age, it was most likely the hacker either obtained the password or the passwords’ strength wasn’t that great.
What is worse is those who get hurt (downtime-wise) when someone does this. It’s not just Comcast, it’s also momandpopshop dot com who might be waiting for an important order to stay in business. Hackers brought down the system, momandpopshop dot com didn’t get the email or order on time and *poof*! They have to sell to WallyWorld Conglomerate.
Ok, maybe a little skewed tangent in there, but you get the idea. It may be a funny thing to do, but not to those who need it.