TechCrunch.com had a post up sometime claiming that India's largest software company Tata Consultancy Services' website, www.tcs.com had been 'hacked'. The update to the post confirms that only some users are seeing the compromised version of the home page ie. this is a classic DNS hack and only certain name servers seem to be affected.A DNS (domain name server) is basically a centralized online directory/database which keeps a list of IP addresses corresponding to the domain names that we type into our browser. If it's compromised, typing in a URL could take you to a completely different site as intended by the hacker, often (though not in this case) with dangerous consequences. When twitter.com recently fell victim to such an attack, the perpetrators could have got access to twitter usernames and passwords if they'd put up a fake login page so that users would think they were entering the information into twitter.com as usual. Luckily it was just a political statement by Iranian hackers.
If TCS is to blame at all here, it should be for poor housekeeping. I mean, which large company, especially in tech, lists third parties (honeybeetechnology.com doesn't even look legit??!!) as its "administrative & technical contacts" on the WHOIS page? Certainly not TCS' competitors! See Infy's WHOIS page here and Wipro's here.
Nevertheless this is going to be a bit of a headache for the TCS PR team, especially since publications like the Washington Post syndicate TechCrunch content, lending the news an air of credibility in the Indian company's primary market. Also, one can always bank on a few idiots to give a racist slant to this news.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments Section