Who You Gonna Call, The Intenet Police? | Hacker News Reader

Who You Gonna Call, The Intenet Police?

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20 pointsdavepell5 comments

"After Hudson rightfully said no, the engineer responded by hijacking the site, right down to the domain name. And he did a pretty good job of it. No one could help. Other engineers didn’t have the required credentials. His hosting provider had no means to solve the problem. And even GoDaddy (where he registered the domain) couldn’t figure out a good way around the hack that the engineer had devised to hold the site and its contents hostage."

It's strange to me that the registrar would acknowledge that a takeover had happened but wouldn't be able to fix it, unless the domains were transferred to another registrar. The article doesn't give any details, but if that's the case, the lesson there is not to give other people access to your account at that level (GoDaddy provides a feature to prevent exactly that situation: http://www.godaddy.com/account/accountexec.aspx).

We must have to assume the developers registered the domain for the client and it was in their name and the client had no way of actually proving that the domain belonged to them - probably because it was an obscure name, and not the name of their company.

So, essentially, incompetence mixed with blackmail. Can't really blame technology for that.

(edit: I think there's a big part of the story we're missing here. Seriously, what company that claims to be a "new and promising internet business" outsources its engineering?)

ok, I've read this over twice, and I'll bite - how was this "hijack"/"hack" done? I think it'll be helpful for us to know this so we can try to avoid it in the future.

I had the same problem. It was hard to continue reading when I was "stuck" back in the "hijack" paragraph.

All I can figure is that the consultants were the ones who purchased the domain and it was in their name. They built and hosted the site, and could change all passwords to everything. The service being built must have had an obscure name, not the official name of the company that had hired the contractors to build it so they couldn't even fax in identifying documents to GoDaddy to show claim to the domain and that it was their company.

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