Pakistan’s domain registry provider PKNIC has posted an explanation of what it says happened when visits to a number of high-profile websites last weekend redirected to another page — in many cases to one with a photo of penguins and a message from someone called Eboz claiming responsibility. It says that during a security upgrade, a vulnerability opened up, which let someone breach four user accounts, which in turn impacted nine DNS records, leading to “several website addresses” being impacted. It doesn’t categorically rule it out, but it believes that there was no phishing attack carried out through the redirection. It says that the issue causing the problem was reverted a few hours after it was discovered and PKNIC itself was not hacked.

Earlier reports put the number of total websites affected at 284 — we are asking PKNIC if that number is accurate.

Ironically, all of this appeared to happen because PKNIC was in the middle of a security upgrade. Citing the LinkedIn and Twitter password breaches, the registry’s executive chairman Ashar Nisar noted that PKNIC had been upgrading its site to protect against SQL injection attacks, installing “a more complex system” to do so:

“However, it inadvertently left open a vulnerability, under certain obscure conditions and contexts, that was used in the recent attack. As a result, in addition to a thorough investigation of our entire site and systems, we reverted to the simpler more robust model of filtering out everything unknown, instead of continuing to use the new system that had been tailored to the latest threats using more complicated algorithms.”

In effect, what PKNIC is now going back to doing is whitelisting approved domains and sites rather than blacklisting those that are deemed a threat. As Patrick Morley, the CEO of cybersecurity (and whitelisting) specialist Bit9 once described it, “The challenge with security is that it is hard because to create new threats is so easy that they pass right through” an existing blacklist security wall. So the solution is to trust only those that are known, which become part of a whitelist.

This doesn’t mean that PKNIC is not still searching for stronger solutions that will give it more domain flexibility in the future.

It says it is planning to “invite friendly hackers to test drive the security of our systems.” That will involve cash rewards for those successful at finding vulnerabilities for unfriendly hackers do. PKNIC says it will be announcing more details on this “shortly,” but notes that it will be similar to the competitions run by the likes of Google. Google put aside $2 million for hackers who help it troubleshoot its Chrome browser. Recently, a teenager won the top award of $60,000 for discovering an exploit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

According to a new study by website monitoring service Pingdom, 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world (as reported by Alexa) now feature some form of official Facebook integration on their homepages. That’s already a pretty impressive number, but once you also include basic links to Facebook, the number goes up to 49.3%. The company’s official like button is featured on 7.3% of these sites.

Facebook is clearly becoming a “part of the Web’s DNA,” as Pingdom puts it, and it’s far ahead of its competitors. It’s worth noting, though, that the number of sites that integrate Facebook seems to have remained relatively stable over the last year. Almost exactly one year ago, BrightEdge, for example, reported that it found some form of Facebook integration on about 47% of the Web’s top 10,000 sites.

Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn

In Pingdom’s study, Twitter is only featured on 10% of homepages in the top 10,000. Around 4.3% of these sites use Twitter’s official share button. Despite these relatively low numbers, it’s worth noting that 41.7% of sites feature links to Twitter – a number that isn’t that different from Facebook’s.

As for Google’s social network Google+, which – depending on who you ask – is either hopping with activity or dead – Pingdrom reports that it’s actually doing quite well in terms of homepage integrations. Over 13% of the sites surveyed in this study used Google’s +1 button on their homepages and 12.3% include links to plus.google.com. As Pingdom rightly points out, though, many site owners integrate Google+ to boost their search engine rankings and “this might inflate the numbers a bit since they are not necessarily connected to Google+ from the perspective of the site owners, but rather seen as a means to influence SERP.”

LinkedIn, the other network Pingdom looked at, is far behind the competitions. Just 0.6% of the sites studied here integrate it on their homepage and 0.3% use the social network’s official share button. Even with basic links included the total number of sites integrating LinkedIn is just 3.9%.

Counting all kinds of links and official widgets, here is Pingdom’s final count:

1. Facebook: 49.3%
2. Twitter: 41.7%
3. Google+: 21.5%
4. LinkedIn: 3.9%

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For those of you who love the Olympic Games, the 2012 London Olympics are just under 100 days away. The International Olympic Committee just launched an awesome Olympic Athletes’ Hub which connects Olympic fans to their favorite Olympic athletes. It’s a searchable directory of both past and present Olympians that collects and displays posts from their Facebook and Twitter accounts. It strings in photos, videos, training tips and tons more from verified athletes’ popular social media accounts. Already, over 1,000 Olympians have joined and as you can imagine the number is continuing to grow. As the summer games in London begin, people can also live-chat with athletes directly from the Olympic Village and see real-time results from the competitions.

With special thanks to the International Olympic Committee, we have two Samsung Galaxy Tabs to give away, along with one autographed t-shirt from Michael Phelps, and one from Usian Bolt. We will pick two winners.

If you want to enter, all you have to do is follow the steps below!

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite Olympic sport is

We’ll go through all of the comments and make sure you followed the steps correctly before picking our winner. We’ll choose the two winners at random and contact them once the giveaway is over. This giveaway is a worldwide giveaway where anyone can enter.

Image via.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch