Craigslist taken offline by hacker

Craigslist is a site where people run ads for all sorts of items they want to sell, jobs, and a plethora of other strange listings and personals. Millions of folks use the site each month and if you frequent Craigslist and were unable to get on the site yesterday, it wasn’t just you. Craigslist was hacked and the hacker was able to take the site down for many users.

Craigslist was offline Sunday night and for visitors to the site during this time craigslist either didn’t load or redirected to random local versions of the site. Craigslist appears to be back up and operating normally as of now. Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist posted a note of the Craigslist blog explaining the situation.

According to the post at about 5pm PST Sunday evening, the Craigslist DNS records maintained by a domain registrar were compromised. The compromised DNS records were able to redirect users to non-craigslist sites.

According to Buckmaster, the issue is now corrected. However, Buckmaster says that some ISPs have cached the false DNS information and may continue to show incorrect sites for a few hours. People who are still unable to reach Craigslist.com or .org need to call their ISP and ask them to flush all Craigslist entries from their DNS servers.

SOURCE: Venturebeat