Perl.com Taken over by Domain Squatters
twitter.com
twitter.com
I’ve seen other domains get stolen recently, it seems to be about the same time.
Patterns dot com Piracy dot com Perl dot com
All stolen at around the same time.
With patterns, the thief hacked the network solutions account, put the domain under privacy, transferred it to a Chinese registrar, and then put the old whois data back. They then tried to sell it on sedo and afternic for 10 percent of what it’s worth.
I have been able to get sedo and afternic to remove the listings. But patterns has not been returned to its owner after about two months. Still working with the owner and registrars on that.
My advice is to lock down your domains, register them for at least 5 years, and if there are changes deal with them quickly. Once a domain is transferred it’s much harder to get back. It can be done, but it’s a lot of work to unravel it all.
I mention registering for 5 years in the future because if something like this happens, there will be no question as to whether or not you lost the domain because it expired.
.name domain isn't available in some of these, decide to use inwx.com
What I'd like to see a lot more of is WebAuthn specifically, rather than "hardware keys" generally. It's frustrating to me that the outfits I deal with only have OTP and not WebAuthn.
I don't see why offering MFA hasn't been made a requirement in order to be an accredited domain registrar.
Yes. At the time, and with the information available, it looked like an isolated incident. It now appears that this affects several, dozens maybe, or potentially many more domains after what appears to be a social engineering attack at a registrar. Check your domains!
The record wasn't supposed to expire until 2029, so not sure how the squatters got this domain.
There's too little information to draw conclusions at this point.
The current registrar has contacted me. They've locked the domain and we need to submit some paperwork. It shouldn't be that big of a deal even though it's annoying. All of this was handled quickly (12 hours) because of the attention to the internet in general.
I can confirm that Neurologist dot com and Chip dot com were also stolen at the same time. There may be others.
> @xsc: Looks like this breach also affected http://piracy.com http://chip.com http://neurologist.com along with http://perl.com (https://www.afternic.com/listings/drawmaster)
EDIT: On a sidenote:If this[1] is true, looks like the attacker may have compromised another registrar that perl.com used (Network Solutions), moved domain to another registrar, than KS. Still a big concern though
[1] https://nitter.net/DInvesting/status/1354778895749419013
https://www.icann.org/news/blog/documentation-is-key-to-reco...
If documentation is key, then perhaps have a service that will, take your documentation, hash it and then you can store the hash on your domain root (much like google analytics). Then if you lose the domain, you have wayback machine style proof that the domain originally had these docs associated with it.
(I can see some downsides to this but what do people think?)
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/l6d8ws/perlcom_unfrie...
> The perl.org and perl.com domains are unrelated and have different rightful registrants, so this doesn't affect perl.org.
briandfoy 1 hour ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/l6d8ws/perlcom_unfrie...
From what I can see Perl the programming language has its home at perl.org, which is running fine. The .com does not show up prominently when googling for perl. Based on Google's cache it seems it was some kind of programming-related news page. Was it relevant/popular in the Perl community?
But O'Reilly's interest in Perl waned and it sat, moribund, for several years (which probably explains its lack of Googlejuice).
A few years ago, the Perl community approached Tom and he let them take over running it. The team behind the PerlTricks web site ported over all the old articles and had been posting new ones. It had become a pretty useful resource again.
So, yes, it would be a shame to lose it. But from what brian has posted elsewhere on this thread, that seems unlikely to happen.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Do...
Now it's on perl11.github.io
When the squatters give up, fine, but GitHub served us well over the years. Better than everyone else, esp. Google.
cperl is an interesting fork with a lot of good ideas, but his tendency to submit patches to core modules to work around cperl bugs without full explanation and then yell at the people asking for justification and actual tests for those changes meant that such patches don't tend to actually end up applied.
Given reini is undeniably brilliant when at his best, I consider this deeply unfortunate, but I've tried to explain the concept of "even if you're sure you're right, you need to actually convince people of that" multiple times both online and in person and apparently not got through, so at this point I can only suggest that people who're interested in his brilliance follow their code for themselves and submit the interesting stuff as patches.
A great shame, but things are what they are.
... wasn’t Perl.com an O’Reilly Publishers asset?
If you look at a case like this, there is absolutely no question or ambiguity "which perl.com domain people really want." This issue only exists because of an artificial monopoly and an application of capitalism to an allocation problem that doesn't exist.
Domain names should be a thin wrapper around private/public keypairs. Domain keys should be pinned per application or per first use OS-wide, with configuration tools to unpin and update the mapping. Any critical access, such as update servers, should always use the full key anyways. There is no reason in principle that there shouldn't be multiple name-key assignments for perl.com, except inasmuch as it would make webdevs' and OS developers' jobs slightly harder. Hell, ping both and see which one matches the pinned https key for perl.com, and this problem would already have been solved! This whole monopoly is caused by a bad band-aid technical solution for a social problem that we can and should find a better solution for.
I'm not saying "boycott DNS." I'm saying "the fact that everyone is fine with the current state of affairs is an embarrassment."
I want an OS built from the core up around a web of trust model. I want my browser to ask my (manually introduced) peers "which of those versions of perl.com do you think is the one I want." I want a computer with no hardcoded central server queries at all. (And while we're at it, I want it connected to the internet via mesh links.) But I'll never get that, because it'll always be easier to just hardcode some central authority and go home.
In this case, as someone who doesn't follow Perl, how would I make an informed decision on which perl.com domain I really want?
Several ways.
If you are accessing the domain locally, you'd normally be looking for entries that match the private key you have stored. So if you ever went to that domain, you'll get the same remote again.
If this is your first time accessing the domain, you'd ask your peers what version of the domain they have stored. Those aren't randomly assigned, but people you know IRL, similar to Freenet. You could do some degree of onion routing if you care about keeping sites you go to private from your friends. And again, you'd only do it the first time. And this is hard to attack because you can't make a person have friends in the WOT graph.
When you are following a link, the person placing the link could always just attach the full private key to the link tag.
If you are copying a URL from your browser bar, the browser could attach a random set of index-value pairs of the private key. This would be very hard to spoof, but not increase the size of the URL by much. That would cover you for posting links in forums and chat rooms.
Of course if you were searching for the domain, your first hit would almost certainly have the correct key.
Only if you are told the URL through an out-of-band source, and almost nobody you know (transitively) has gone to that domain, you are in the situation of having to figure out which key is the true key. In that case, you could fall back to certificate checks. Note that certificates as a market are a lot more competetive than the domain name market.
So there's no one-size-fits-all solution, but just like right now, most of the time you wouldn't have to think about it. And unlike right now, if it goes wrong you get a nice error instead of silently the wrong domain.
The point is - I got all of the above by thinking about the problem for maybe ten minutes. This is far from unsolvable. We as a community are just terminally lazy.
This way anyone who gets access to the keys, even temporarily gets to take over the whole domain. No chance to resolve the issue with a registrar who can manually review the case and revert changes. This would include anyone working on that level of infra in your company and anyone who hacks them.
I'm not sure what would you compare the https cert to without a central authority in that case.
We tried the web or trust with PGP and it turns out key management is really hard and apart from few geeks nobody's that interested.
Agree that nobody cares about this though. I'm certainly not surprised that we settle for easy mediocrity.