07/02/2010

TCS Hacked! If you visit the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) website tcs.com right now, the top Indian tech company’s site has been hacked and a “For Sale” sign is displayed on the site with a notice that the tcs.com domain name is for sale. It points out prospective domain name buyers to a contact email address.

Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is the top software services and consulting company in India and is the largest provider of information technology and business process outsourcing services in India. TCS is a subsidiary of one of India’s largest and oldest conglomerates, the Tata Group.

It is unbelievable that some hacker could easily hack into one of the most secure websites of the top technology company in India. Its a Sunday evening here in India and I wonder if someone at TCS is looking into it…

Update: Aditya says this is a DNS hack because the page opens well with anonymous proxy surfing tools.

and then an TCS employee commented on his blog that

tcs.com was not hacked. What did happen was that the DNS records that supply the IP were reset to some other IP. Whether that was done by actually hacking tracom/netsol or by social engineering a valid change request I do not know. I know the site was fine because going through the internal DNS got me the correct IP address and the correct content. I believe the problem started sometime before 1am IST [this is a wild guess, from other symptoms], and was resolved around noon or so [this guess is more accurate because I was semi-actively monitoring it].

In both instances, it would have taken a few hours for the bad data to expire from DNS caches. Depending on who your DNS provider is, you may have seen it “come back” at different times. If you were running your own DNS, you could have purged your DNS cache manually and would know more accurately when it came back (or just run a “dig +trace” at 10-minute intervals looking for the right IP to come back)

MoneyLife adds that

The Internet Protocol (IP) address of TCS’s website is 216.15.200.140. However, the hackers changed it to 205.178.152.154, re-pointing the name server (NS) records of the company’s website which may have been done by breaking into the NS or the registrar account, said a cyber-security expert …

… Incidentally, the changed domain ID, 205.178.152.154, shows the ISP name as Network Solutions LLC, which is the registrar of tcs.com as well. So primarily, it appears that someone might have entered into TCS’s registrar account; possible using a compromised password, added another expert.

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