Wednesday evening hackers infiltrated popular American ISP Comcast's official website, effectively preventing 14.1 million subscribers from being able to access their emails, news or tech support.

Site content was replaced by the following message: "KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast. sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."

According to Broadband Reports, they got into the site's domain registrar account at hosting provider Network Solutions, altered Comcast.net's DNS servers, then redirecting visitors to foreign IP addresses. All was well late the next morning, though some users still had trouble with their accounts and/or the website. It's said no private information was stolen, and Comcast is working with authorities on the matter.

Not to blow this out of proportion, but why hack Comcast out of all sites? Well, if you know much about net neutrality, it's a pretty easy guess. For one, Comcast is the second largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the U.S. Second, they're notorious among the general population for being against net neutrality, which, summarized, is basically the Internet economy ruled by a more socialist system as opposed to a capitalist one. The corporation was proven last year to utilize "traffic shaping" measures to hinder or altogether cease intended use of filesharing/torrent programs, affecting both uploads and downloads.

Another heavily debated aspect of net neutrality is the "charging content sites a premium for more reliable delivery of their content," which some organizations, companies and corporations believe in; this is just fancy language for saying it's open season as far as some ISPs are concerned, where people can pay each other off for optimal site performance (speeds, services, etc). Overall, this is detrimental to the customer, and harmful to the concept of the Internet as a free and open information and communications tool, as we would see, presumably, a rise in prominence and traffic of corporate websites, and a decline in everything else (blogs, personal websites, independent media, etc).

While companies like Verizon oppose net neutrality, there are some out there who openly support it, such as Free Press' policy director Ben Scott:

"We applaud Chairman Conyers and Representative Lofgren for their leadership and commitment to the public interest on this critical issue. The Internet is the greatest engine of free speech and commerce since the printing press. The future of the Internet as we know it depends on maintaining the freedom and openness online that we have always enjoyed. Congress must step in to defend the open Internet."

Still, I have to wonder why the hackers didn't leave some sort of message detailing their motive; 14.1 million subscribers is a big audience. Maybe it'd go a little something like this: