Fans of FC Zenit Saint Petersburg, one of Russia`s top football clubs, got a surprise on April 6th if they visited the team`s website.
Instead of seeing stories and images of their favourite soccer players in action, they were presented with a page of insults directed at the city`s political leaders.
Images of Saint Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko and Vadim Tyulpanov, speaker of the city parliament, were shown alongside a message that translated is part as:
"To hell with the party of thieves and pickpockets. They have already destroyed more buildings than the Nazis during the attack on Leningrad between `41 and `44".
The rant went on to criticise political leaders for poorly clearing up icicles and winter snow, leading to the tragic death of five people, including two children.
Interestingly, a message on FC Zenit`s Facebook page denied that their website had been hacked, and put the blame on a problem with their DNS records.
If that`s right then it means that the club`s own web servers weren`t necessarily breached by the hackers.
DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like example.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup at the DNS registrar, so when you entered FC Zenit`s website address into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn`t under the club`s control.
Thank the stars that those behind this attack didn`t point football fans to a malicious webpage containing malware, rather than a political message.
One question remains. How did the hackers change the DNS records for the football site`s website? Could it be that they managed to guess the passwords used to secure access to those records?
FC Zenit may be feeling sick as a parrot after having had their website messed around with in this fashion - but they`re not the first to have suffered in this way.
Note: The original article is avalable at http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/04/06/hackers-mess-with-top-russian-football-clubs-website/
