A Turkish hacking group defaced the homepage of Sandy Springs-based UPS Sunday, declaring it “World Hackers Day.”

The group, TurkGuvenligi, replaced the company’s webpage with its name over the image of a red dragon and directed visitors to its Twitter feed. The group’s Twitter site, which features tweets in Turkey and broken English, made no apparent reference to the UPS hack.

UPS spokeswoman Laurie Mallis said the company is looking into the defacement, but she had no immediate comment.

Zone-H.org, a site that archives hacked webpages, reports that TurkGuvenligi is behind similar attacks Sunday on the webpages of Vodofone, National Geographic, computer company Acer and British technology site The Register, among others.

Sophos.com reported the following info:

Popular websites including The Register, The Daily Telegraph, UPS, and others have fallen victim to a DNS hack that has resulted in visitors being redirected to third-party webpages.

Further websites which have been affected include National Geographic, BetFair and Acer.

It’s important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked, although to web visitors there is little difference in what they experience – a webpage under the control of hackers.

Instead of managing to breach the website, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected.

DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn’t under the control of those websites.

Because of the way that DNS works, it may take some time for corrected DNS entries for the affected websites to propagate worldwide – meaning there could be problems for some hours ahead.

In many ways we have to be grateful that the message displayed appears to be graffiti, rather than an attempt to phish information from users or install malware.

(Source: AJC)