Eircom has confirmed that the hacker attack that led to surfers being misdirected to bogus websites and two subsequent outages over two weeks was a ‘moderate attack’ known as cache poisoning.

‘Cache poisoning’ is a form of attack where the open-architecture of a domain name server (DNS) is re-configured to direct authentic web traffic to non-authentic web sites. Eircom users initially found that when they went to popular sites like Facebook, Bebo and RTE they were redirected to sites with pictures of scantily clad women.

It is understood that Eircom’s DNS servers, which usually receive 4.5m requests every five minutes, had to cope with double the level of traffic and outages resulted.

Eircom users were without web services over the weekend of Sunday 5 July and on the evening of Monday 13 July.

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