Eircom’s DNS Server Hacked?

There’s been a lot of noise from Eircom’s customer base about slowed and seemingly broken connections over the past few days and Softpedia has been pretty quick to point the finger and say that someone’s been playing fast and loose with Eircom’s DNS servers.

So far, Eircom has steered clear of the implication that there’s been any untoward activity, but there has been a strangeness to the whole affair that’s impossible to deny. First, there’s the fact that Eircom’s service has been patchy for about a week now, with users reporting outages since the beginning of July. The second oddity is that that many users attempting to go about their usual day-to-day browsing found themselves redirected from legitimate sites like Ebay and Facebook towards ad-laden pages they really shouldn’t have been. That combination is suspicious enough, but the response from Eircom doesn’t help nearly as much as we might hope.

Eircom hasn’t dismissed the situation out of hand, instead going so far as to issue a statement to the effect that, “Customers may have recently experienced delays in web browsing and may have been unable to access the Internet. In some cases, customers may have been redirected to incorrect websites,” we’re with them until this point, but the problem is that Eircom seems a little hazy when it comes to the facts surrounding the whole debacle.

Instead, it simply says that, “This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of Internet traffic being directed to our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet to our customers.”

The real problem here isn’t just the lack of detail, but that the original link to the announcement made by Eircom is now dead, which only adds to the vaguely seedy feel of the whole affair. Moreover, searching Eircom.ie for “DNS” simply spits out a “no results matched your search” message, which is decidedly unhelpful. For now we’re not saying anything incriminating, but this has been a wake up call to some Eircom customers, with many spitting bile about the situation (ironically enough) across the web.

Incidentally, switching to OpenDNS seems to solve the vast majority of the current issues. You can read more about how to pull that off here. We have to thank the people following our Twitter, @Komplettie, for that tip.

You can read more about the whole Eircom affair over at Softpedia.

Update: You can read a more up to date story on Eircom’s DNS situation here.

Tags: broadband, dns, eircom, hack, ireland, Irish, outage