Vodafone website hijacked by hackers

Vodafone one of 200 sites hit by Turkish hackers

VODAFONE fell prey to hackers on Sunday as part of a co-ordinated attempt to hijack several major websites.

Turkish hackers have claimed responsibility for the breach, which saw visitors to Vodafone.com, as well as websites for the The Telegraph, Acer, Betfair, National Geographic, The Register, and UPS, presented with the same page claiming credit.

Since the attack, which took place at around 8pm, Vodafone's website has since been restored to it's normal state.

A spokesman for the firm, Simon Gordon, said there was no security issue.

“Traffic for some sites, including Vodafone.com, was redirected to the hackers website. The domain name server had been breached, which meant other sites were affected,” he said.

“No confidential data is held on the site.”

Over 200 sites were affected as the hackers targeted a DNS (Domain Name System) services for the websites, NetNames.

The DNS is the system used to translates a domain name into an IP address that can be put into a web browser, so by hijacking the hub, almost every website which used the service was affected.

The hackers called themselves “TurkGuvenligi”, which translates as “Turkish security”, said on their Twitter page they had carried out the attack “just for fun”.