IT Manager - Hands On Servant Leader, Developer of Staff Skills, Collaborator of Teams, First of His Name
If you are responsible for any website domain, PLEASE make sure you secure you registrar account, setup MFA and have a long complex password. If you lose access to your registrar account or your hosting account and/or FORGET to renew your domain then the bad guys definitely will help you out by taking it over. I just spent about 4 hours helping a friend track down ownership of their domain. It is hosted on WordPress and luckily I still have admin access to that. They have email from that domain and it is hosted with Google Admin. We were also able to reach out to the company who hosts the domain, albeit pro bono for the last several years, something they would love to offload. I contacted GoDaddy and since I can't provide proof of a GoDaddy account then I am in a Catch 22 right now. I did submit an email to abuse@godaddy.com and submit a request on their site changeupdate.com. The key to this whole thing is the whois record. It shows Wild West Domains as the registrar which I know is a reseller (subsidiary) of GoDaddy. Unfortunately the domain was renewed on 11/1/23 which either means it was automatically renewed and we need to find the good owner, OR it was forgotten about and a bad guy purchased and renewed it on their account and is looking for a big pay out. We know also the WordPress has several updates needed and the content on the site has been completely changed to some Japanese blog. I am now waiting on the abuse department to reply back to my request. If this domain was not set to auto renew then it goes to the open market after so many days and is fair game for anyone to renew. This actually happened to Google a few years back. So if a large company can lose access to their domain then so can you. - https://lnkd.in/gkPEFF6F Stay tuned for more on this story... Updated: https://jasr.me/g
Allan B. Pintner
5mo
Thank you for the excellent advice, Jason. It's nice to have a good guy out there with all the bad guys waiting in the shadows! If one doesn't understand what can happen it's easy to ignore the details...
Technologist passionate about using tech to make a positive impact on the world around us.
5moLol. Didn't realize Google lost their domain. I'm curious if they paid a ransom or got it back by other means.