

Who You Gonna Call, The Intenet Police? - davepell
http://tweetagewasteland.com/2011/04/calling-the-internet-police/

======
nbpoole
" _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>).

~~~
dpcan
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.

~~~
magic_haze
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_?)

------
magic_haze
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.

~~~
dpcan
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.

