Three charged with Comcast.net hijacking

Three men were charged on Thursday for last year’s redirecting of traffic of Comcast’s website to a site where a shout-out to fellow hackers was featured:

Christopher Allen Lewis (aka EBK), 19, and James Robert Black Jr. (aka Defiant), 20 allegedly hijacked Comcast’s domain name, causing a disruption in service that cost the company $128,000. The two were aided by Michael Paul Lebel (aka Slacker), 28.

According to the Wired, the hackers managed to gain entry to the control panel for Comcast’s domains by social engineering Network Solutions, the registrar that handles these domains, with a couple of phone calls and emails sent from a Comcast email account they hacked into.

According to Lewis and Black, their original plan didn’t include the redirection, but only changing the contact information for the Comcast.net domain. They say that after doing so, they called the real technical contact and told him what they have done.

Since he dismissed their claim with a laugh and hung up the phone, they decided to extract vengeance by redirecting the traffic. The indictment validates their claim about the phone call.