The nameserver where expired domain heavyweight SnapNames resides was temporarily hijacked Wednesday night.
Depending on how the nameserver was cached at your ISP, you may have seen a page like this. The page showed an Iranian flag with the sentence “This Site Has Been Hacked For Some Fraud Selling(1)”. It also had an e-mail address [email protected] and mentioned Monte Cahn of Moniker. Of course, neither DNJournal nor Monte had any involvement in the incident.
At DNForum, a SnapNames representative explained what happened:
“Fun times tonight down at the domain back-order plant.
Neither our database nor our site were directly hacked in this incident; rather, the nameservers at the registrar where the “snapnames.com” domain resides were temporarily changed to point elsewhere. This has been fixed at the source, but depending on what is cached at your ISP it might not be fixed for you yet.
Also, please know that were someone to ever actually hack our database, the credit card numbers we keep on file are stored fully encrypted. Just a hack would not be enough to compromise our customer info.
And, finally, of course Moniker had absolutely nothing to do with this.”
This isn’t the first time an attack has hit a domain name services company. A number of denial-of-service attacks were launched on domain name parking companies in August. The domain name market is competitive and some of the players resort to such attacks to get a leg up on the competition.
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