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(Reuters) - A Hong Kong cargo ship loaded with wheat bound for Iran has been hijacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, the official Xinhua agency said on Tuesday citing China’s maritime search and rescue centre. There were 25 crew members on board, none of them from Hong Kong or the Chinese mainland. The ship was carrying 36,000 tonnes of wheat to Iran’s Bandar Abbas port, the report said. Pirates in the area hijacked a Saudi supertanker with a $100 million oil cargo on Sunday.

World cargo trade, already jeopardized by a global interbank lending freeze, is threatened even more by these roving bands of Mad Max-type pirates on the high seas. Pirates off the coast of Somalia have hijacked 33 ships this year. According to AP, “Pirate attacks off the Somali coast have surged 75 percent this year, as bandits lured by million-dollar ransoms have pushed farther out to sea in search of bigger prey among the 20,000 oil tankers, freighters and merchant vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden each year. The pirates have already shifted their tactics in response to the patrols, positioning attack teams on the northern and southern ends of the shipping zone to stretch the already thin naval forces.”

(CNN) — Armed gunmen hijacked a Japanese freighter and its 23-member crew off the coast of Somalia, South Korean officials said Sunday. The 20,000-ton cargo ship was seized 96 miles (154 km) east of the Gulf of Aden on Saturday, the South Korean news agency Yonhap said, quoting the country’s foreign ministry. The Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, has become a treacherous stretch for ships, particularly along the Somali coast. More

Also See: Warships protect sea route from pirates

zdnet.com
It’s official, even a pothead can social engineer Network Solutions. In an in-depth interview with the hijackers, featuring some screenshots showing they had access to the complete portfolio of over 200 domain names controlled by Comcast, the details of how they did it, and why they did it are now coming straight from the source of the attack:

The hackers say the attack began Tuesday, when the pair used a combination of social engineering and a technical hack to get into Comcast’s domain management console at Network Solutions. They declined to detail their technique, but said it relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar. Network Solutions spokeswoman Susan Wade disputes the hackers’ account. “We now know that it was nothing on our end,” she says. “There was no breach in our system or social engineering situation on our end.”

However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room” at “69 Dick Tard Lane.” Comcast, they said, noticed the administrative transfer and wrested back control, forcing the hackers to repeat the exploit to regain ownership of the domain. Then, they say, they contacted Comcast’s original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they’d done.

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