Turkish hackers on Thursday defaced the official sites of the international organisations that oversee the Internet's critical routing infrastructure and regulate domain names, researchers said yesterday.

Two of the domains under attack include the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, icann.org) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA (iana.org) - two organizations that that have dominion over numerous critical functions regarding Internet regulation.

IANA oversees the international coordination of the domain name system, IP addressing and other Internet protocol resources. ICANN has global authority over the Internet's identifier system, allocating internet protocol (IP) address space and managing the Web's domain name system.

A group calling itself "NetDevilz" claimed responsibility for the hack, which Thursday morning temporarily redirected visitors to the sites for IANA and ICANN. Users who tried to reach iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net were shunted to an illegitimate site, said researchers at zone-h.org, a group that collects evidence of site attacks, including page defacements and redirects.

According to a screen capture of the defacement snapped by zone-h.org, the bogus site simply displayed a taunting message: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

The hackers redirected IANA and ICANN traffic to the same IP address that they used last week when they broke into Photobucket Inc.'s image-sharing site and pushed its users to a server operated by Atspace.com, a German hosting service.

Only a day before this security breach, ICANN approved a measure which will remove the restrictions on domain suffixes, allowing companies to register any word as a URL suffix. Where users were previously limited to 21 suffixes, such as .com and .net, sites will now be able to use such domains as .news or .bank.

ICANN expects the new rules to go into effect some time next year.

"The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the net," said ICANN president and chief executive Dr. Paul Twomey.

"It's a massive increase in the 'real estate' of the internet."

The expansion will "make a big difference in how the Internet looks and works," ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at a news conference yesterday. "This is a historic resolution."

New domain names may have a business focus such as .perfume or .silk, or a regional focus, such as city names, the group said. If more than one entity seeks to register a suffix, ICANN said it is considering auctioning the domain.

ICANN plans to allow non-Latin characters as well, opening the door for domains with Chinese and Arabic characters for the first time.

The company also provided further guidance on how the new domains will be distributed and managed. By the second quarter of 2009, ICANN plans to begin accepting applications for new domains.

In the case of a trademark or cyber-squatting spat, the company plans to allow trademark holders to file appeals. The appeals will then be reviewed by ICANN and a decision made.