Friday, November 16, 2007

Marvel Comics Hacked?

At the time of this writing, Marvel Comics' website is down. Oddly, when my Firefox browser reached Marvel as instructed, the address bar added a string of "docstrange"'s, 20 of them, to the URL. A Marvel Dr. Strange promotion gone awry in the coding, or someone having a little destructive fun with Marvel's web presence? Anyone else? Anything different on other browsers? IE "cannot find server" but no mod to the URL.

Update, 9:10 p.m. EST: Marvel.com is still "Dr. Stranged" and apparently we here at Bostodelphia can actually say "You heard it here first," since no one online seems to be reporting this. I would have discounted it as run of the mill technical difficulties, if 1.) the outage hadn't been going on all day (generally if a commercial site's experiencing technical difficulties that's sandbagging them for the long run, they still have enough control of the site to explain that they're down for maintenance) and 2.) the "doctorstragedoctorstrange..." string redirect seen in Firefox's address bar (this has only been seen in Firefox, Internet Explorer still takes you to an unavailable page error message, but no URL modification). We've been digged, and commentator Redvader over there laments that this event has come "after I plunked down $60 for the digital archive too."

My first thoughts were that this might be some sort of not quite well planned special Dr. Strange roll out announcement; but "something" more substantial, or at least advertorial, would have happened by day's end. So, let's assume some sort of hack. Now is this mere pranksterism, or something more invasive jeapordizing those with account information linked to Marvel' digital archive subscriptions? Also, I'm not very well plugged into the online comics fanbase, but really, no one's mentioned this but us?

Update #2: Further Bostodelphia Coverage can be found here and here.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been getting the same thing. I'm glad it is happening to someone else. I thought I was going crazy!

Anonymous said...

Same here. I've tried to connect using two different computers with cleared caches.

Anonymous said...

same here, too. I have experienced the same thing with firefox (hacked) but I tried IE and I haven´t problems , it only ran slowly.

Anonymous said...

Same here, wont work on my computer, but went to cousins house and it worked just fine.

Cobalt Wolf said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cobalt Wolf said...

Checked with Opera 9, same thing as Firefox. IE gives me the "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" error message.In Firefox, I'm getting a more detailed error message: "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete." That must be the the endless "doctorstrangedoctorstrange" string. I find it odd that a high profile site like that hasn't been fixed yet, or at least posted a page saying they're having tech difficulties.

(arrggh! I hate it that one cannot edit posts on Blogger, only delete and repost :-P)