, Newsbytes 2002-05-10
A bizarre message that appeared Wednesday on several Web sites operated by domain registry NeuLevel was not the work of hackers but instead resulted from an internal error, company officials said.
The short message, which was displayed for several hours Wednesday in place of the site's usual home pages, read "Prowl requests your assistance against the Decepticons!"Some NeuLevel customers who viewed the notice concluded that the company's sites had been vandalized by attackers.
"Evidently NeuLevel has been hacked. I wonder if the registration databases for dot-biz and dot-us have been compromised too?" wrote one user on a message board system operated by ICANN, the non-profit that oversees domain registrations.
NeuLevel, a joint venture between NeuStar and Melbourne IT, operates the registry for the dot-biz top-level domain. NeuStar took over operation of the dot-us registry from the U.S. government last year.
According to a NeuLevel spokesperson, the curious message was displayed at the company's sites, including NeuLevel.com, Whois.biz, Neustar.biz, and NeuLevel.biz, after an internal test server was mistakenly configured so that it could be viewed by Internet surfers.
NeuLevel public relations manager Barbara Blackwell said the message was part of a test page, and that "there absolutely was no security breach."
The company took the testing site offline immediately after being notified of the incident, according to Blackwell, who said she could not explain why the company's technical staff chose the text in the test message.
Gary Osbourne, a computer programmer in Vancouver, Canada who stumbled upon the misconfigured site Wednesday, posted a message at the ICANNwatch.org site about the incident, noting that Prowl and the Decepticons are characters from the "Transformers" computer games and line of Hasbro toys.
"Even if this was just an in-house configuration error, that's still very unprofessional. It's just pretty lame," said Osbourne, who reported that NeuLevel's sites were unreachable for several hours as the company apparently worked to correct the problem.
NeuLevel is at http://www.neulevel.biz .
ICANN is at http://www.icann.org .
ICANNwatch is at http://www.icannwatch.org .
Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com .