Pierluigi Paganini
October 13, 2016
Crypto-currencies continue to be a privileged target of cyber criminals, Bitcoin wallets and services provided by many companies operating in the industries have been targeted by criminal organizations as never before.
Blockchain.info, the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service, suffered a mysterious outage this week and experts speculated that a cyber attack has disrupted the platform.
“Looks like our site is down. We’re working on it and should be back up soon.” reads the message displayed to the visitors during the downtime.
BlockChain informed its users about a possible DNS issue via Twitter.
We’re researching a DNS issue and looking into it. We apologize for the inconvenience. Stay tuned.
— Blockchain (@blockchain) 12 ottobre 2016
“We’re making progress resolving the issue, but it may take upwards of several hours until services are fully restored,” states a second Tweet from the company while users were not able to access their online accounts.
At the same time, someone on Reddit reported the changes in the DNS records.
It looks like blockchain.info has just had their domain name hijacked. The whois and DNS records suddenly jumped from CloudFlare to a cheap web host. From the cache, the names used to be
Name Server: BETH.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: JAY.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
and were then changed to
Name Server: DED88057-1.HOSTWINDSDNS.COM
Name Server: DED88057-2.HOSTWINDSDNS.COM
when queried these are returning
;; ANSWER SECTION:
blockchain.info. 11360 IN A 192.236.200.26
or
;; ANSWER SECTION:
blockchain.info. 14400 IN A 198.44.48.226″
The DNS server records for blockchain.info and blockchain.com were hijacked. Usually, this practice allows crooks to conduct phishing attacks in order to steal bitcoin wallet credentials.
Experts from OpenDns early detected the change in nameservers:
critical: blockchain(.)info now has completely new nameservers (ded91868-1(.)hostwindsdns(.)com,ded91868-2(.)hostwindsdns(.)com)
— dnsstream (@dnsstream) 12 ottobre 2016
Experts at OpenDns investigates on the IP changes:
OpenDNS blocked the above IPs to prevent their customers using Bitcoins to fall victim of the scammer.
Fortunately, nothing happened to the Blockchain users, but DNS hijacking are very dangerous because unaware users could be redirected to rogue websites that mimic the legitimate ones in the attempt of stealing credentials.
Below the official statement issued by the company about the incident:
“Earlier today, we discovered our DNS registrar had been compromised. We took immediate action to resolve the issue. To be abundantly cautious, we’re waiting for the DNS to propagate universally across the web before bringing our services back. Once DNS has propagated, we expect to restore services ASAP. Our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience.”
At the time I was writing there is no news regarding potential breaches of the users’ bitcoin wallets.
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(Security Affairs – Bitcoin, DNS hijacking)
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