HostDime Customers Affected by DNS Issue

The web sites of some HostDime customers are offline or being redirected to other sites after apparently unauthorized changes were made to key DNS records, the company indicated. The issues affected sites hosted by HostDime, DimeNOC and Surpass Hosting. At one point the Surpass Hosting home page displayed text that its server was "controlled and secured by H4PS Inc. Palestine Hosting and IT" (see screenshot).

Surpass Hosting described the problem as a "security concern" at its registrar affecting network name servers. "Some of our clients may notice their websites being down at this time or pointing to a different location, but rest assured we are working on this and treating this with great urgency," Surpass said in a message posted at a backup support site. "We would like to stress that no data has been compromised and we will be releasing a full outage report in the upcoming hours."

UPDATE: At noon EST an update was filed at Surpass Hosting, which indicates that the event is ongoing: "We have been communicating with our domain registrar during the last several hours concerning the DNS changes to domains that were registered through us and are currently pointing to a location that is not on our network. We have made progress in the last hour, and are moving towards having the DNS records updated in pointing to to the correct location and then your site will begin to resolve within the next several hours."

 There's additional discussion at Web Hosting Talk.