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By SecureWorld News Team
Fri | Sep 1, 2017 | 8:15 AM PDT

It has been trending on Twitter (#WikiLeaksHack), but in reality, it was a DNS poisoning served up by the hacker group OurMine. 

The group played it up as if they had actually hacked the site in response to a previous challenge by WikiLeaks.

And at least part of the reason the #WikiLeaksHack hashtag was trending is that OurMine asked visitors to make it so:

 

What is DNS poisoning?

DNS poisoning, or spoofing, takes advantage of weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) to direct web traffic away from the site you intend to visit (the legitimate one) and re-directs it to a fake site. And this can spread from DNS server to DNS server, according to experts, which increases the amount of traffic that is redirected.

It's unclear how many DNS servers sent traffic to the fake site in this case.

WikiLeaks has not commented on the DNS poisoning, and the re-direct appears to be over. But others on Twitter wasted no time challenging OurMine to hit specific targets they have in mind. 

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