PeopleareParked.com

As many of you have heard, David Airey, a graphic artist from the UK, had his domain hacked and stolen. Since his blog is popular, he announced that he would be going away on vacation, so his fans would be aware of the blank time period. According to his story, during this time, someone hacked into his domain registrar’s account, redirected it to another site and then held the name for ransom.

After going in circles with his domain registration company, web hosting company, and the hacker himself, David finally found how the hack was initiated. Turns out, it was a Google GMail vulnerability (Google GMail E-mail Hijack Technique). Evidently, this issue has been fixed, but David is still a victim, who hasn’t gotten his domain back yet.

What can be learned from this awful experience?

1. Re-read my earlier post on passwords. Basically, don’t use the same one for all sites and make them more secure by using letter and number combinations.
2. Don’t forecast that you will be going away on vacation. It’s like putting a sign on your house that you won’t be there, making you more vulnerable to burglars.
3. Don’t use free email accounts like GMail and Yahoo, for your main business email account.
4. Use reputable hosting and domain registration companies.
5. Make sure all your domains are locked. Sounds like David Airey’s was locked, but you don’t want to make it easier for anyone to transfer.
6. Check your email, even while on vacation. I know… I don’t want to either, but this is a case and point on what can happen. Even if it’s just once every few days or in the least, once a week, you’ll keep watch on a site or business that’s very important to you. If you really can’t, maybe you can entrust a friend with this task.
7. Don’t allow Firefox or IE to store your passwords.
8. Don’t encourage these thieves by paying ransom. I applaud David for not giving in to this blackmailing scheme.
9. Keep your own computer more secure by clearing cookies/history, and having firewalls etc.
10. Some sites that might help, if you are a victim - ICANN, or even the FBI.

Thank you, David Airey, for sharing you story, so that we all might learn from it and good luck.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.