The attack allowed hackers to gain administrative access to some of the organisations systems. Attackers sent phishing e-mails disguised as internal ICANN communications to staff members, and were successful in capturing the e-mail credentials of several employees which were then used to compromise other systems.
One of the systems attackers were able to access was ICANNs centralised zone data service (CZDS), which is used by domain registries to request access to DNS root zone files. As a result, user account details such as e-mail addresses and passwords, as well as the zone files, were compromised.
ICANN said it stored passwords as salted cryptographic hashes, but it had deactivated all CZDS passwords regardless as a precaution. The organisation said it had not found any evidence that Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) systems - which manage unique names and numbers - had been compromised.
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