Kevin Mitnick, the most well known hacker of the 1990’s had his personal and business websites compromised and defaced recently, and if you query Mitnick’s domain today, you still see remnants of the hack. Words like:

$ whois mitnicksecurity.com

MITNICKSECURITY.COM.HACKED.BY.NERD.FROM.WEB-HACK.COM
MITNICKSECURITY.COM

In a phone conversation today, Mitnick disclosed to FireHost’s Chief Security Officer, Greg Martin, that he was using secure hosting practices on his site, but the hackers got to his website through his hosting company’s DNS provider. They compromised the control panel for his domain names and redirected his site to a defaced version.

Greg Martin responded to the event, “DNS security has been a hot button since last summer’s poisoning attack discovered by Dan Kaminsky. Mitnick’s attack was much more straight forward, and this is an example of why we don’t rely on third party providers to secure our customers. By maintaining the infrastructure in-house, we can help ensure the integrity and security of our customers’ web sites.”

Greg reached out to Lance James, CTO of Secure Science and author of Phishing Exposed for a comment on how he recommends protecting website from a similar attack. Lance says part of the answer is partnering with a secure web host that can provide protection from DNS vulnerabilities.

“Control Panel software has a history of successful attacks, and it is not surprising that a high-profile site such as mitnicksecurity.com is susceptible to vulnerabilities. His site is a natural target, and unfortunately, it can be extremely embarrassing when an expert in security chooses a hosting provider with such vulnerabilities,” Lance James.