Google.co.ma, the domain name for Google Morocco’s search portal, was taken hostage by hackers earlier today reportedly for several hours before the problem got fixed (it’s working fine again now). We got a bunch of tips about it, and the situation lasted long enough for lots of people to take screenshots of the website the domain name briefly pointed to due to the hack.
You can find loads of screenshots here and here, but the main domain name pointed to the website shown on top of this post.
There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again.
PAKbugs.com leads to a forum where Pakistan hackers hang out, and the names on top of the web page above are all members of the message board. They’re being proud of it here.
This website (in French) claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too.
(Via ArabCrunch)