Domain Hijack story

[Light Speed]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...x_hijack_more/

The hijackers took control of the Panix company's domain and put up a fake website to extract money from customers. So far, the hijackers have not been found.

Man, that would suck.

Any suggestions on how to prevent this?

[kattouf]

Yupp, don't ignore domain transfer approval email because it will get transfered to the other person after 5 days if you don't reject the tranfer.....

[Curt]

Also, keep your domain "locked" at your current registrar. Transfer requests *should* automatically be denied if the domain is locked.

There's not much you can do to prevent what happened to Panix though. They had their domain locked and never even received a transfer approval email. That's why this is such big news in the domain industry. What happened isn't supposed to be able to happen.

[cambodia]

that feature is nice easy for me to transfer domain for my client from registrar who always block them from transfer out and thank to godaddy that have locked option

[mresell]

The fault here is really the registrar.

[generic]

and from what I have seen and read, I bet there will be a lot more in the coming months too, not like anyone will ever get to keep the name, but its about as effective as hacking into your server and shutting you down, and a lot easier.

good thing, you can get it back, bad thing, it can shut you down for a week or so..

[dpyers]

Originally Posted by mresell

The fault here is really the registrar.

I think the fault is more in ICAHN's policy than a registrar's execution of it. But I do think the registrars ought to offer the option of domain locking by default.

I use registerfly and they had the option to lock all my domains at once which was useful. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to select domain locking as an account default.

[Curt]

I really think it's more the registrar's problem, as it sounds like the domain *was* locked, and there's also that the owner received no email notification. While I disagree with ICANN's policy of inaction indicating acceptance of a transfer (Isn't that actually illegal in most countries?), ICANN had nothing to do with actually allowing this specific transfer.

[Brangwyn]

Some of my customers and I have had some bad dealings with Melbourne IT before, It wouldn't surprise me if in this instance they do carry a fair bit of the blame.

[matthewshull]

Weird thing is, I had a client who wanted to transfer his domain to me. The admin contact of the site was an email address at his domain, that the previous developer/host setup for him. He doesn't know how to access the email. So I did a transfer knowing that no reply would be made and the domain should transfer.

It never happened. The other day I got a reminder email to retry the transfer. Go figure.

[Curt]

Do you think it's possible that the transfer approval email bounced and the registrar cancelled the transfer?