Domain Hijacking: Who Registered Your Domain Name?

Web Hosting Provider Explains Domain Hijacking and How to Protect Your Domain

Wanna talk about headaches?

How’s this nightmare scenario: you register a domain name, build a big site, spend 425K to market the site, only to have the domain name (and all that goes with it) hijacked, as in, you don’t control your own digital property any more? Just a bad dream? Site owners, wake up. Your domain name can be hijacked. Bye-bye business.

Legal Hijacking

Happens all of the time. If you were smart enough to register JohnnyDepp.com for $2.95 and you’ve kept up your payments in hopes that it’ll someday pay off, some judge may simply hand Mr. Depp the domain name. And you, the legal, out-of-pocket owner of the URL are pounding sand.

True story. A farsighted visionary named John Vail registered ‘niagraregion.ca’ to dive traffic to his realty site. No biggie, right. Well, apparently it is a biggie. You see, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) forced Vail to hand over his legally registered name (and one he relied on to drive traffic to his main site, btw) to hand over his URL (and again, key marketing tool) to the Regional Municipality of Niagara, a bureaucracy that delivers water, housing, garbage pick-up and other services.

The site that John Vail legally registered and integrated into his marketing was arbitrarily handed over to a municipality, even though the URL was not specific to the municipality. It’s a fickle word, the W3, and things don’t always turn out in any way that makes sense.

Illegal Hijacking

Then, of course, there’s fraud (rampant), schemes, scams. Ponzi cons, MLM rip-offs, phony registries, international law and a  jerk who hijacked your domain name and all you know is that he’s in the Philippines. Dude, you are sunk. 

According to a report from SEDO [Edition 101], “Selling/and or buying domain names through an unsecure service provider [a new web hosting company] can leave you subject to fraud and domain hijacking - use an Established Web Hosting Provider.

Recently there has been a spate of incidents where a seller has in effect has his or her domain stolen when conducting business outside of a reputable marketplace.

The Scam

I decide to sell my highly successful (or just cool) domain name to you. You finance the transaction through PayPal using hacked or cracked accounts. You don’t know the account is a fraud, you sign all the papers and the “new owner” of “theresasuckerborneveryminute.com is long gone. You’ve signed over ownership of that name without receiving a rupee or a bat.

Your site, your business, oh yeah, your livelihood is now owned by some 16-year-old teen hacker in Nepal. And what are you going to do? Sue? Great, you win a yak in the settlement.

Is There No Protection for the Site Owner?

What do you think?

If I could highjack the Coke site, I wouldn’t be typing this now, but Coke pretty much has that red and white branding sewn up. It all comes down to which company you use to register your domain. Let your web hosting provider explain...

If you go with “Sleazy Steve’s Domain Registration and Adult DVD, Pty. Ltd” of Perth, Australia, that’s a domain name that can be accessed by anyone through Whois, the resource that provides all information on site ownership including telephone number company name, address, email addy – it’s all there for some con-puter hacker to transfer your site from its current server to a server in Istanbul. Bye-bye business. You’ll wake up one morning, log on to your web site and get a 404 error message.

There are a couple of things you can do to protect your domain from being usurped while you’re sleeping. First, good servers will notify you, the registered site owner before allowing any site to be removed from a server. Second, quality web hosts have protocols to follow whenever a web site is migrated.

Finally, you can “lock” your site with a good web host. That means no one can access the site, move it, sell it or auction off its links without your say so.

It Doesn’t Cost Any More And It’s Worth $48 a Year

The difference between low-ball (where not talking free web hosting which is something to avoid altogether) and quality web hosting adds up to $4.00 a month. Cheapie, low end hosts, that must cut security costs just to keep in business will nick you $2.95 a month for a basic shared hosting account.

A quality host, with layers of securities and layer upon layer of security will set you back $6.95 a month. We’re talking $4.00 a month! That’s the cost between a domain register who will protect your good name and one that doesn’t know you as long as you’re under a two-year garbage contract.

So, it’s pound foolish and penny-wise when you can buy business security for just $48 a year.

Think of it as low-cost insurance, and be sure to ask your web host what it does to protect domain hijacking.

And look out Coke. I’m watching you and your fancy logo.

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