Three Indicted For Comcast Site Hack

Three alleged hackers this week were indicted for a 2008 attack that redirected traffic from the Comcast Website to a prank page.

Christopher Allen Lewis, 19, and James Robert Black Jr., 20, are accused of being the hackers "EBK" and "Defiant," who hijacked the Comcast domain in May of last year, according to news reports. The prank took down the cable giant's homepage and Web mail service for more than five hours and allegedly cost the company more than $128,000.

Michael Paul Nebel, 27, is also charged with being part of the hacker gang, which called itself "Kryogeniks."

Visitors to Comcast.net were redirected to a simple page reading "KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."

As described in the indictment, the hackers got control of the domain with two phone calls, and an email was sent to the company's domain registrar, Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast email account.

That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast's 200 domains, according to the indictment.

The alleged hackers told reporters after the hack they had tried to notify Comcast of the vulnerability, but a member of the technical staff didn't take them seriously. At that point, they decided to play the prank, one of the hackers said.

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