I’m sure all of you might have already read this. But I can’t stop writing about it, just because this is so scary, and I want to pledge my support to Aibek and team at Makeuseof. I hope they’ll be able to bring back the blog asap.
And in the temporary blog, Mark posts that the thief is someone from Dubai, called Ali Ferank.
This is what he did.
– Called up GoDaddy impersonating Aibek and demanded a domain transfer.
It’s “scary” to know that GoDaddy did that in less than an hour ! Do they normally do it that quick ?
The thief might have already got into the email id to which the domain account at GoDaddy was attached to to accomplish this.
- He got the domain name pointing to his server at namecheap.
- Emails Aibek and team for a price ($2000) to restore the domain.
- Aibek and team denies and is still fighting with GODaddy to complete their investigation and restore the blog back.
What can you and me learn from this?
GoDaddy is good, but not quite safe. I mean if some impersonator calls up claiming to be your domains admin and demands a change, they get it done in less than an hour? That’s completely insane. I haven’t seen such quick turnaround from them for my services.
Picture courtesy: Kwout
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Hi, I'm Mani Karthik, Pro Blogger & SEO Consultant from India. I blog, I Tweet, help websites with SEO. Loves working from home office. Quit my day job as SEO consultant 4 years ago, to pursue full time blogging and consultation. Living the dream now.
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This situation is really very bad. If i lost my web site like this i cant sleep i think. Godaddy is a very big company about domains but how can this happen? Where is the security guy?
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[...] Makeuseof(domain) gets hacked, then blackmailed for $2000 – Quite scary how easy it was for some scammers to hijack a domain through GoDaddy. [...]
This is why you never use GMAIL
-Mike
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Yeah, you have a point there Mike. I guess many people are on gmail today. Even the domain email account is redirected back to Gmail. But how secure is it ?
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Now that site return back.
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really scary, is it not save to use gmail to register a domain at godaddy? never heard this before, may explain?
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I wouldn’t be so quick to slam GD, they are not the first or last registrar to have this happen.
Did they get it back?
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[...] Earlier this month I read how Aibek Esengulov, owner of MakeUseOf.com, lost his domain name to a domain hijacker. The domain was registered at GoDaddy so the criminal (or should I say scumbag, douchebag, a’hole!) called up and impersonated Aibek and demanded the domain name be transferred to an account at NameCheap. Apparently, this was all done within an hour. [...]
[...] all the security issues echoing around, it’s wise to upgrade right away [...]