Well, I lost brand-colors.com
github.com
github.com
This code is only generated once you initiate the transfer of a domain to another hoster. Not sure about the mechanics behind it, but if you enter a wrong auth code with the new hoster, the domain will not be transferred.
Not sure if you could bruteforce those codes, but that would still need somebody to start the transfer...
So what happened here? Did he get hacked? Or did he just forget to pay for the domain name and it expired?
edit: If he forgot to pay I can't really feel sorry. If you don't pay for stuff, you'll get it taken from you.
I know, it’s all my fault. But I guess I hope it could be a lesson for other people that hosts open source projects. A visual verification/check of a static page is not enough to be sure you own it.
All rookie mistakes I learnt from but still painful when you discover at Christmas that your email is not functional.
Sadly, I usually check my domains every now and then, but because the new owner copy-pasted my site, I couldn’t tell when doing a quick visual check.
It was after the 3 months grace period I realized there was some spam on the page. I reached out to godaddy to get told someone else bought it through their “auction service” once I missed my window and that was it.
So I deserved it, for sure. Just never thought I would end up getting bamboozled, someone copy-paste my site to make it look legit past the grace period.
I wasn't able to find any registered trademark (in the US) for "brand-colors", "brand-colors.com", or "brand colors", but a very brief look at the ICANN trademark dispute rules did not turn up any requirement that it be a registered trademark. Maybe I just missed that part, but if I didn't you might be able to get it back on trademark grounds.
The usual hard part of this is showing that the person who has the domain registered now is using it in bad faith. In your case, the fact that the first thing they did was put up a copy of your site, almost certainly in violation of copyright, and then changed links to ones to make themselves money from people thinking they were at your site should be enough to easily show bad faith.