GoDaddy employees used in attacks on multiple cryptocurrency services

Note that the registry may only be available to do unlock procedures for limited hours, usually business hours in their locale; that might be inconvenient if it's not your locale.

My understanding is Cloudflare can do registry locks, but does not offer registrar services standalone. Corporate oriented registrars like CSC and MarkMonitor offer it. I don't have experience eith CSC, but MarkMonitor had a pretty high minimum spend (I think 10k/year) to get on their platform circa 2013; that may have changed, also they're now owner by a VC firm, just FYI.

NetworkSolutions (boo hiss), rolled out a registry lock feature after a high profile hijacking which was why my employer had me work with MarkMonitor.

I've had great experience with porkbun, and no major complaints with namecheap.

Namecheap is bigger, so it's possible to get support people that aren't amazing. Porkbun is pretty small and I feel like there's less room for underperforming support staff when you have less than 10 of them.

Porkbun has an extra "domain password protection" option where you can require and extra password retrieving an auth code for domain transfer. I'm not sure how much use that is though. Once someone is into the account to the point they can change NS, the real world impact is similar to having the domain transferred away (and recovered).

It's been around since 1998 and is a founder-owned company, and the founder wrote the book on managing mission-critical domains:

https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Mission-Critical-Demystifyin...

And they do offer registry lock (on a limited number of TLD's.)

With those instructions, it doesn't look too hard. Without godaddy-specific instructions, I would have had a lot of trouble figuring it out. Unlock registration; get authcode; turn off whois privacy protection; accept transfer. Each done in a different screen.

I went to do that, to discover... this old domain, the oldest I have registered, has both an email and a phone number that I no longer have access to, and which GoDaddy wants to do 2-factor using one of them even though I do have my password. (The last 4 of the phone number I recognize as a landline I last had around 17 years ago, before I had a cell phone. I've had this domain for a while, from before I knew better than to use godaddy). They let me pay them renewal every year without me having to log into my account or notice I can't anymore, which I guess is better than stealing my domain becuase of it, but is also why I hadn't noticed for years I could not log into the account.

So I guess first step is figuring out how to get GoDaddy to give me access to the account again... it looks like that may necessarily involve some disruption/outage to my DNS which is in the old account I can't get access to. We'll see.

edit wait a second, they totally send me a renewal notice to email every year. They know my current email! They are insisting on sending a 2-factor code to a different email I no longer have access to. Wtf is that?

The easiest way to vet them is to call them and ask them what their policies are, then test them (for legal reasons, against your own test domains would be best...). See whether you can find documentation about their policies online. If you can't find them: potential red flag. If you can find them but it doesn't seem thorough/very secure: red flag. If they don't seem to deal with international customers: potential red flag. If they don't support TOTP or U2F, or you can't disable SMS validation: red flag. If their password policies suck: red flag (just create a free account and see what it lets you use). If they don't do both registry & registry lock for your TLD, or won't explain how the process works for that TLD: run away.

Often they may document their online process for doing things like registry lock. Call them up and say you are a potential customer and you want to know what you can do over the phone, then ask them what you need to provide in order to do each thing. They're not going to try to hide anything from you, so they may tell you if (for example) all they need to know is your full name, e-mail address, and what domain you want to unlock. They'll also tell you if they only send EPP codes over e-mail or their web interface, or if they have a way to record customer support requests (like a special verification code for phone support, select lists of people who can administrate the account, etc).

Of course, it's up to each customer service rep to actually follow the Registrar's rules. It just takes one lazy SOB to skip all the steps and just do whatever you ask to ruin everything. So you might also ask to talk to whomever manages the support reps and find out more about them, like how much training they receive and how much oversight is done over each support call. You'll probably have to settle for correspondence over a ticketing system.

Registries you'll probably have to e-mail for their rules, or ask a Registrar. Some registries can be unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger about their policies, but some registrars don't care and will tell you anyway. Personally, I would stay away from the Registries that require two weeks of paperwork just to change WHOIS information.

I don't care. It's a niche service. There are at least tens of thousands of security-paranoid developers who would be a target market for this product. This is child's play for anyone involved in the blockchain space.