In the past couple of days, reports have surfaced on the hijacking of the domains for ICANN and IANA attributed to the group NetDevilz.  According to news articles, an ICANN spokesman stated they were unaware of the events.  The total time for the redirection before the entry was corrected was about twenty minutes.  However it will take 24 to 48 hours after the correction to ensure all the DNS entries are updated.  In that time, users were redirected to a site that stated the follow:

“You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us? haha :) (Lovable Turkish hackers group)”

What triggered the changing of the DNS entries has not been disclosed that I have found.  Dancho Danchevs blog shows an email address listed in the updated records and note the email address in the entry called "foricann1230@gmail.com" as well as the date they were updated as June 26.  Regardless of how it happened (though I'm sure everyone would like to know) there is a big concern here.  Nothing on the internet is safe and if this can happen to these folks, it can happen to anyone. 

It is events such as this that make me more determined to stay a hard nose when it comes to security and protecting the
organization I am supporting.  These events actually do have good that comes out of them.  I always print out these articles and do a screenshot of the article and save it to a file with the url of where I got it.  I can then add them to a presentation and also use them as pass arounds during a presentation or simply highly key points and discuss them with the group.  It is very useful to show to management that the threat is real and we can't let our guard down.  As managers and users alike, they don't understand security, the threats, how they work and the dangers that are lurking on the Internet.  It's hard for management to understand why your security officer sounds like a paranoid lunatic and wants more money for security:>)  Doing this has really helped me to get their attention and to justify the funding to help plus up weak points in our security posture. 

So, take advantage of events that have high publicity such as these, include them in reports to your management and use them to help educate people.  Even though the bad guys may gained an inch, let use it against them to gain a mile in the world of security. We can do this by learning from it and working to use it to increasing awareness and move our own security posture forward.