At approximately 5:00 p.m. PST on November 23, the Domain Name Service records for at least some of the sites hosted by Craigslist were hijacked. Some visitors to Craigslist found that their web requests were being directed to an underground forum that has been associated in the past with the sale of stolen celebrity photos and other malicious activities..
In a blog post, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said that DNS for Craigslist sites had been modified to direct incoming traffic to what he called “various non-Craigslist websites.” The account has been restored, and while the DNS records have been fixed, some DNS servers were still directing traffic to other servers as of late Monday afternoon.
Craigslist's Domain Provider is Network Solutions, which is owned by Web.com.
One site that appeared to be receiving the majority of the traffic destined for Craigslist was “Digital Gangster,” owned by rapper and hacker Bryce Case, Jr., also known as YTCracker, who gained notoriety in 1999 for attacking NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center network.
DigitalGangster.com is billed as a site “dedicated to nothing in particular, except being important. Responsible for millions of dollars in commerce and millions of terrible pranks on the Internet. Warning: Children have been born as a result of posting here (seriously).” Among other things, the site’s members are accused of participating in the publication of photos stolen from Miley Cyrus’s email in 2008.
The forum website appears to have gone down for a period of time as a result of the additional traffic, which indicates that it may have been targeted by a denial of service type attack against the forum. Now the website is active. The site has been a target of previous attacks.
