Hackers hit BECTU's website
Internet surfers found this page instead of BECTU's normal homepage
The union's website was unreachable for several hours on January 31 after hackers struck its hosting company.
All browsers trying to reach the union's home page were redirected to a site advertising various commercial services, many of them associated with the film industry.
According to hosting company The Phone Coop, a problem over registration of their internet domain name, thephone.coop, led to files on the internet's root servers being edited.
Their registrar, Midcounties Cooperative Ltd, apparently altered Phone Coop's DNS records (Domain Name Service), and sent all traffic to a default address instead of the hosting company's web servers.
Due to the server sharing arrangements for websites using Phone Coop as a host, this led to all web page requests for any of their clients being sent to the wrong website.
The problem was resolved during the afternoon of January 31, but will not be completely cleared until the correct DNS settings have propogated over the internet, which can take hours or even days.
BECTU was one of the first UK unions to set up a website in 1997, and there are on average nearly 200,000 hits per month.
Discussions about a major development of the site have been going on within the union for more than two years, and the union is planning to appoint a Communications Officer with specific responsibility for web content and services later in 2007.