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Domain name hijacker gets jail time

Kevin Murphy, August 10, 2010, Domain Registrars

A man who hijacked Comcast’s domain name, causing hours of outages for the ISP’s customers, has been sentenced to four months in jail.
James Black, who went by the handle “Defiant”, will also have to serve 150 hours of community service, three years of supervised release, and pay Comcast $128,557 in restitution.
Assistant United States Attorney Kathryn Warma told the court:

Mr. Black and his Kryogenicks crew created risks to all of these millions of e-mail customers for the simple sake of boosting their own childish egos.

The attack took place over two years ago. Kryogenicks reportedly used a combination of social engineering and technical tricks to take over Comcast’s account at Network Solutions.
During the period of the hijacking, comcast.net redirected to the hacker’s page of choice. All Comcast webmail was unavailable for at least five hours.