Comcast.net, the Web mail portal for Comcast, was hijacked by hackers on Wednesday. The hackers, who said they were from the group Kryogeniks, rerouted the site traffic, shut down service and prevented millions of users from accessing e-mail. The chaos lasted for more than five hours.

According to a Broadband Reports blog, the hackers changed the registrars at Network Solutions, modifying the authoritative DNS servers for the global Internet service provider, which rerouted visitors to Germany and other foreign IP addresses.

The users who tried to access Web mail during that period were redirected to another page and received a welcome text message which read:

"KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."

Besides the access to the Comcast portal, the Web mail and the official Comcast forums were also affected by the hijacking.

The problems were resolved Thursday and the traffic was reestablished on the Website. However, the hijacking continues to affect some clients, Comcast executives said.

"Some customers are currently not able to accessComcast.net or Webmail. Network engineers are working to resolve the issue," said the company execs in a statement to the Denver Post.

Comcast is currently collaborating with law enforcement agencies to find out if personal info of some of its customers was compromised in this accident. So far there were no signs that such a thing happened. It appears that the hackers have only rerouted the DNS servers to send users to a third party site.

However, those involved in the investigation said there is a possibility that the hackers have set up a phony site (a spoof) imitating the Comcast site. The users who were redirected to the fake site could have been force to download malicious software onto their PC that would record keystrokes or steal personal and financial information.