Breaking: Google Morocco Google.co.ma is Hacked!

Gaith Saqer 9. May 2009 - 7:41 AM | Arab World, International, Web 2.0, google | Permalink

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Updates: 1,2 and 3 at the end of the post.

google hacked 2 Breaking: Google Morocco Google.co.ma is Hacked!

Google has local domains for almost every country in the world. And Morocco is one of them http://google.co.ma/ . However it appears that it is hacked, as of now.

Once you try to access the domain, you get a message that says: HackeD By PAKbugs, calling them selves ZombiE_KsA Cyber Criminal spo0fer x00mx00m. I have no idea who they are, but KSA might be the acronym of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That does not mean the hacker/s are Saudi, as anyone might use that name. However there is a link to Pak Bugs website.

Habib Haddad the Founder of Yamli, tweeted this discovery on twitter, again this shows how social media, namely Twitter makes breaking news really hyper breaking.

ArabCrunch will contact Google to see what went wrong.

Update: An Internet user in Egypt reported to AC, that the domain is back to work. However at my end (in Jordan) http://google.co.ma/ still not working but http://www.google.co.ma/ is working fine. So this seems like a DNS attack.

Update 2: ArabCrunch was tipped that Google does not forward all traffic in Morocco to www.google.ca.ma anymore, but to google.com that means if you write www.google.com from Morocco it will take you to google.com page not www.google.ca.ma

Update 3: The domain is back to work now. As we said it appears like a DNS attack: DNS hijacking to nic.ma that handles DNS for Morocco’s domains. It appears as the hacker forwarded/ redirected the DNS (74.125.77.104 redirected to 174.37.141.242)

PAKbugs.com seems a forum where Pakistani hacker hang out, appears to be hacked as of now, so the hacker is hacked

I have previously emailed Google and the hackers, until now I got no answer form either of them.

Update 4: We just received an email from ZombiE_KsA who is part of the group which hacked Google.co.ma domain. He said that he is from Saudi Arabia but originally Pakistani. He also confirmed that they did the hacking through DNS hijacking to Network Information Center of Morocco. (Where the domain DNS is hosted.)

He was also upset that I suggested that PaKBugs.com might been hacked; in fact according to him, their hosting company Softlayer closed their site after receiving an email from Google. He added that now they have a new server and the website is up and running again.

On the other hand, a Google spokesperson told ArabCrunch:

“Google services in Morocco are not hacked. Since Friday PST, some users visiting www.google.co.ma were redirected to a different website. We’re in touch with the appropriate hosting service to help investigate the issue.”