Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2002/04/19/ntl_hacked/

NTL hacked?

Update: Nope, says NTL

By Tim Richardson

Posted in Security, 19th April 2002 13:35 GMT

There appears to be trouble at NTL.

The corporate musings on the cableco's ntl.co.uk Web site appear to have been replaced by a simple message: "Whoops!"

NTL are looking into it, we're told. ®

Latest: Just had a peep at the site and it appears that NTL has sorted it out.

Latest latest: Received this from NTL explaining that its site was not hacked.

"Following customer feedback on a availability and performance, we have been moved the hosting of our ntl corporate web sites (ntl.com, askntl.com, ntlhome.com, ntl.ie, ntleurope.com etc.) onto a new, more robust, hardware infrastructure.

This is now based in our new Winnersh Data Centre, supported by our outsource partner, IBM, on a 24x7 basis. This is a massive improvement on the old arrangement where this equipment was in our old Guildford Data Centre and supported internally for just 0900-1700 hrs.

When the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a major web site changes, it takes some time for the Domain Name Servers (DNS) within Internet Service Providers (ISP's) around the globe, to automatically register this change.

Domain Name Servers convert a web address (such as www.ntl.com) into an IP address, so that the network equipment in the Global World Wide Web can find and direct traffic to the physical web server that hosts that site.

Therefore customers typing a web address, for a period of time, will have got the old site - which we internally set to "Whoops!". However, after a
period of time (a few hours) all DNS server around the World automatically register the location of the new address - and customers are routed to the correct site. We believe this is now happening.

This is analogous to moving house and sending all of your friends a postcard that says "We have moved". It takes a little bit of time for everybody to
know you're at a new address."