The websites of Google Pakistan and Microsoft Pakistan has been infiltrated and defaced by Turkish hackers on Saturday morning.
Internet users from Pakistan are normally redirected to the search engine giant’s home page in the country (www.google.com.pk) to type their search queries, but the re-direct page stopped working after it was defaced (and was taken to a new page shown below). Later on, the users ended up using Google’s international home page.
The hackers removed the Google logo and search bar and changed it with an image of two penguins walking on a bridge adding a message in Turkish. An English translation of the message reads, “Eboz of a friend always there for me. My homies have not shot by me with every breath.”
In addition, the hackers also inserted the words, “Pakistan Downed,” which probably means the Pakistan home page has been taken down.
Furthermore, the hackers also wrote a tag line at the bottom of the page, an English translation of which reads, “Hello friends who are still alive, not dead!”.
One of the blogger from aurblog investigated about it, and wrote, “Upon investigating a bit, I realized it’s not the Google’s servers/data centers that have been compromised. It’s rather the infiltration in PKNIC’s database, which is the official domain name registrar for Pakistani cTLD .PK domains. The conclusion was quick to make as the WHOIS record of google.com.pk point to some free hosting service as DNS providers, which obviously can’t be Google.”
The blogger from aurblog was puzzled on how the hackers were able to infiltrate the PKNIC console, and he wondered if the password of the console has been compromised. According to the blog, the access code to the user console would be retrieved not until Monday because the PKNIC offices are close during weekends, and it is also a public holiday in Pakistan today.
According to aurblog, “Even if Google Pakistan’s domain manager manages to retrieve the control and updates to correct DNS settings, it could still be several hours before propagation and restoration of Google Pakistan’s home page.”
Meanwhile, the hackers also defaced Microsoft’s homepage (Microsoft.pk) in the country with the same technique.
