Pakistani Hackers Took Google Morocco Down

by MJK on May 9, 2009

Today a group of Pakistani hackers brought down the Google Morocco search engine for a long time. The following is the screen shot of the page after it was defaced by them.

The groups has a forum named Pakbugs where they claimed responsibility for it. The webpage can be accessed by clicking here. According to TechCrunch, which broke the story, the site has been hacked in the following way:

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.

More screen shots of the hack can be accessed by clicking here. It makes me wonder that our fellow Pakistani brothers along with their friends from other Islamic countries have also learned the techniques of hacking websites. Brining down a famous site like Google is not a child’s play and hence we can easily infer that the hackers are very well advanced in their techniques. Even though it is not a very positive thing to hack websites but one thing is sure that these hackers will come to the rescue of Pakistan if someone tried to hack our sites. They have proved this in the past when they hacked Indian sites in retaliation for hacking Pakistani sites. Lets hope we use our knowledge for positive purposes.