Hackers attack Time Warner Cable’s Internet service

Orange County Register ^ | February 26th, 2009, 9:15 am | Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I’ve been receiving complaints from readers who are Time Warner customers and, apparently, this is serious stuff.

Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner’s director of digital communications, said its DNS servers (the system that matches easy-to-remember web addresses to the corresponding numbers — such as ocregister.com instead of numbers) have targeted by ”denial of service” attacks for seven days. Without these translations functioning, web browsers are unable to locate their destinations.

In a message, Simmermon said “hackers have launched a series of DOS attacks on Time Warner Cable’s DNS servers, affecting customer experience in our Southern California and National regions.”

It ain’t pretty, he said. Customers are being affected and getting intermittent error notices like “page cannot be displayed” when looking up a site online.

Reached this morning, Simmermon said that Time Warner isn’t going to ignore this.

“This is a crime that is being perpetrated on us. It’s a big deal and it’s affecting a lot of our customers. We will prosecute,” he said.

Customers should be getting an e-mail on this later today, he said.

Here is the rest of his earlier message:

These attacks are not uncommon, especially for a network as large as ours. However, this particular series of attacks has been larger and more difficult to contain than similar attacks in the past. We suspect that the attackers are using “zombie computers,” or hijacking unsuspecting subscribers’ machines to perpetuate the attack without its owner’s knowledge.

As of 6PM EST on Feb. 24th, we have amplified and expanded early detection and response to this sort of problem.

[Eye of Unk]

They should do something constructive like a short documentary of the usurper-in-thief and the eligibility questions.