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Comment by omega3 | Hacker News Reader

I had a very hard time reading this article. It's filled with so many platitudes and truisms ("And, it always helps to have friends and good relationships with the people who are able to help.") and yet it doesn't really explain what happened. For all I know they might have forgotten to pay for the invoice.

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At the very end they speculate it was a social engineering attack at their registrar that started last year and affected multiple domains. Oddly, the author says they weren’t ”the injured party” and therefore didn’t ask the registrar to verify that. I’m not stating the registrar because there’s no supporting evidence that they were at fault but the author gave it in the article.

He says he himself was not the injured party, a legal term, so the information was not provided to him and he does not have a legal right to it.

This. There's only so much he can talk about from his side, and whoever legally owns the domain will have to provide information on what exactly happened-- should he wish to. That's also important, the owner may not want to talk about it in public (but that would just make the initial blog post even stranger, so I'm assuming they eventually WILL speak up about the rest..)

I agree the article did a bad job keeping me interested, but I think it is more of a statement about the rumor mills and fake news about the takeover and to be cautious about falling into it.

Yeah it's not very good writing, but the tl;dr is that someone executed a social engineering attack against Network Solutions, got them to update contact information for the domain owner to themselves, transferred it to BizCN, then transferred it to Key Solutions, and then attempted to auction the domain name for $190k.

It reads like the author is basically guessing, in the lessons learned he mentions 2FA and in the same sentence he mentions that it might not have helped ultimately. He mentions it's a speculation, he'c not the injured party. Someone else did some "forensic work" yet the link doesn't work. I feel this should have been written by the domain owner or the registar.

Couple of other issues: "It’s important to have one face (mouth?) to represent the diligent work everyone was doing." From the registar article: "the Perl team has yet to respond to our request for a comment"

I don't know who The Register tried to contact, but it wasn't me. As soon as their article came out, however, I contacted the reporter.

And, I've fixed the broken image. Thanks for noticing that.

> It reads like the author is basically guessing, in the lessons learned he mentions 2FA and in the same sentence he mentions that it might not have helped ultimately.

If the attack was mounted via faked documents which is what I think the article implied then 2FA would not have helped as it was attack on a procedure of replacing contact info.

I mean, the second paragraph starts with "First, this wasn’t an issue of not renewing the domain."

The article was changed since my original comment.

Aaahh dang, I see!

grep "What we think happened"

I thought this article was interesting from an incidence response point of view, perhaps it have been better framed with a different title.

OK, at least it isn’t only me.

Sorry but individualization and soul and style and wit are American ideals. If you want drab Soviet style information only, look elsewhere.

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