The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been hacked by unknown attackers that allowed them to gain administrative access to some of the organization's systems, the organization confirmed.
The attackers used "spear phishing" campaign to target sensitive systems operated by ICANN and sent spoofed emails disguised as internal ICANN communications to its staff members. The link in the emails took the staff to bogus login page, where they provided their usernames and passwords with the keys to their work email accounts.
The data breach began in late November 2014 and was discovered a week later, ICANN, which oversees the Internet's address system, said in a release published Tuesday. ICANN is the organization that manages the global top-level domain system.
"We believe a 'spear phishing' attack was initiated in late November 2014," Tuesday's press release stated. "It involved email messages that were crafted to appear to come from our own domain being sent to members of our staff. The attack resulted in the compromise of the email credentials of several ICANN staff members."
With those details, the hackers then successfully managed to access a number of systems within ICANN, including the Centralized Zone Data System (CZDS), the wiki pages of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), the domain registration Whois portal, and the ICANN blog.
