Photobucket, the most popular photo sharing site on the net, had it’s DNS servers hijacked by a Turkish hacking group. The group, called NetDevilz, made the site redirect to a third party domain hosted by atspace.com. As a result, Photobucket was down for 15 minutes today while they fixed the compromised DNS server. They released this statement to their users:

          “On Tuesday afternoon, some users that typed in the Photobucket.com URL were temporarily redirected to an incorrect page due to an error in our DNS hosting services. The error was fixed within an hour of its discovery, but due to the nature of the problem, some users will not have access to Photobucket for a few hours as the fix rolls out. It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect.”

This is the second such attack in a month. Three weeks ago cable, phone, and broadband giant Comcast had their DNS records hijacked, resulting in Comcast.net redirecting to a defaced page and their WHOIS replaced with sexually graphic and profane information. That group of hackers were also responsible for the attacks on the MySpace pages of celebrities Tila Tequila, Hilary Duff, and Justin Timberlake.

Photobucket users are still reporting minor outages and problems accessing their accounts, but these issues should subside once the DNS info propagates across the net. DNS hijacking seems to be the new weapon of choice for hackers unable to directly compromise a site. The new trend is worrisome-it’s only a matter of time until Paypal or a major bank’s site falls victim to a DNS hijack, and if the hackers manage to create a perfect copy of the site to redirect to, thousands of people could find their bank info in the hands of criminals.