Hackers recently took control of some of ICANN's domains and posted a "humorous" message.

The New York Times is apparently very interested in the story of the ICANN domains that were briefly redirected two weeks ago by a group of Turkish hackers. On Monday, the paper ran a second story on this as a follow-up to a piece it ran on June 27th.

Entitled "Icann Blames June Site Hijack on Registrar", the NYT article comes across to me as yet another example of the press taking a shortcut on the facts.

Anyone reading this title will be left in no doubt as to the fact that ICANN is blaming Register.com, the registrar that has the hijacked domains under management, for the incident. The article is based on an ICANN release published on July 3rd in which ICANN never actually blames Register.com.

What ICANN does say is : "The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN's registrar's systems (…) It would appear the attack was sophisticated, combining both social and technological techniques, but was also limited and focused."

There's no doubt that Register.com must accept responsibility for what happened. But until more is actually known about the attack (ICANN's release indicates that "A full, confidential, security report from that registrar has since been provided to ICANN with respect to this attack") and in particular, if it was facilitated by failures at the registrar, deciding that said registrar is the bad guy in this is a little too convenient in my book.

As everybody knows, nowadays hackers are so clever at exploiting loopholes in any system that anyone can become a victim. You never know, even the New York Times might be hit one day…