Hacker apparently hijacks Craigslist site and takes it offline

The online classifieds website Craigslist has been offline since last night and is the apparent victim of a hacker. The site either does not load, or it redirects to random local versions.

The problem was spotted by The Next Web. We’ve got a message into Craigslist PR and will update with a response.

According to TNW: “Users visiting the site yesterday evening were redirected to a site called Digital Gangster as a result of what looks like a DNS hijack.”

UPDATED: Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster has written a blog post confirming the DNS attack:

“At approximately 5 p.m. PST Sunday evening the Craigslist domain name service (DNS) records maintained at one of our domain registrars were compromised, diverting users to various non-Craigslist sites,” he wrote. “This issue has been corrected at the source, but many Internet service providers (ISPs) cached the false DNS information for several hours, and some may still have incorrect information.”