Anime News Network’s Domain Hacked, Twitter Accounts Hijacked

Earlier this week, anime and otaku news site Anime News Network was the victim of hackers who hijacked the sites DNS records, allowing them to take over the site’s primary domain “AnimeNewsNetwork.com.” This also allowed the hackers to intercept any emails sent to the site, and used this to also take over several of the site’s associated Twitter accounts.

The actual servers and hosting for the site were untouched, and while the primary URL for the site is still down, they’ve put the site back online at the alternate URL of “AnimeNewsNetwork.cc.” The site’s management also released the following statement:

Last night, Anime News Network suffered a pretty major hack, one that took down our original domain (www.animenewsnetwork.com) and compromised our email domain — meaning that for the moment, you can’t reach us through any animenewsnetwork.com email accounts. We’re working on getting this fixed.

Further, AnimeNewsNetwork’s domain was breached, but not our servers – your personal information is safe, however we always recommend changing passwords just in case.

Through this process, the hacker also compromised some of our Twitter accounts, like @anime and @animenewsnet as well as a handful of personal staff accounts like @ANN_Ed and @ANNZac. We’re still working on cleaning all this up – it’s a pretty involved process that may take some time, but for now we’re live at AnimeNewsNetwork.cc. Please spread the word on social media, as this is our new (temporary) home for the time being! We’ll be back with more updates as things progress – we apologize for the inconvenience, and shall rise again soon.

Anime News Network has also restored their @anime twitter account, but people will need to refollow the account. This is, frankly, a site admin’s worst nightmare, and we wish them all the luck in restoring their site.