Air Malta webpage up for sale, domain attacked

A singular sight welcomed Internet users who yesterday morning logged on to Air Malta's web portal looking to book a flight or obtain information on Malta.

Instead of the usual Air Malta logo, users were told that the Air Malta site was for sale. They were greeted by a brief messege saying: "This domain has recently been listed in the marketplace. Click here to inquire or call..."

Although an airline spokesperson told MaltaToday that Air Malta was investigating the issue together with its DNS hosting provider, a major problem with the domain registrar apparently caused the problem.

The mishap lasted some hours and a problem occurred in the Network Solutions database that resulted in Air Malta's domain, airmalta.com, being marked for sale.

However, Air Malta's webpage was not the only to suffer problems on Thursday. After experiencing severe problems early in the morning, the airline's webpage was up and running a few hours later.

Later in the day, Network Solutions, Air Malta's domain name registration company, issued a statement in which it noted that in the process of resolving a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) incident on Wednesday night, "the websites of a small number of Network Solutions customers were inadvertently affected for up to several hours."

The company said it was working with these customers and have resolved most issues, none of which involved malicious activity.

"No confidential data was compromised, including passwords, credit card information, or cookies," the statement added.

The problems experienced by Air Malta's webpage on Thursday was apparently caused by an attack-related problem and also the result of a misconfiguration.

According to a number of blogs specialising on internet services, hijacking of a domain name's DNS records is one of the worst attacks an organisation can suffer, as an attack results in the loss of control of a domain.

The problems encountered by Network Solutions' clients between Wednesday and Thursday, including Air Malta, meant that the webpages were offline intermittently for a few hours, some and some customers were redirected to another nameserver.

Nearly 5,000 domains may have been affected based on passive DNS data for those IPs.

Hence it seems that the temporary interruption of service, which has now been resolved, had nothing to do with the airline's failure to renew the domain name since this is automatically renewed for a number of years in advance. 

However discontent at the airline's management team led by CEO Peter Davies is mounting.

The airline's maladministration was once again exposed in London recently. MaltaToday is informed that the Air Malta offices in Upper Richmond Road, London were recently visited by bailiffs after Air Malta failed to pay the rent.

 An airline spokesperson did not deny that the bailiffs visited its London offices and confirmed that Air Malta's tax payment did not reach the council.

"Air Malta has sent its due Council tax payment of its London office in time. However, for reasons beyond the airline's control, this payment did not reach the Council. Upon notification this issue was immediately resolved and all payments have been settled," the spokesperson said.