ISP suffers apparent domain hijacking

A New York Internet service provider said Sunday it was working to recover its domain name and e-mail services after suffering an apparent hijacking.

A Panix.com representative said that ownership of the domain had been moved sometime Friday evening to a company in Australia, that the domain name server (DNS) records had been moved to the United Kingdom, and that the company's mail had been redirected to a company in Canada.

"We are pulling our hair out here," said the representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The company warned that most customers will either have no access to the Panix.com domain or will arrive at a false site. E-mail to the domain is being directed to the false site and "should be considered lost or compromised," the ISP said in its posting.

It is unclear how the domain could have been transferred without the consent of the owner, and the representative expressed frustration with the domain registrars.

"The registrars have not been as cooperative as common sense would dictate," the representative said.

As a temporary workaround, the company suggested using the Panix.net domain in place of the Panix.com domain. The company said that it was working around the clock to recover the domain, but warned that this may not happen until Monday due to time zone differences.

In September, German police said a teenager had admitted to hijacking the domain of the eBay Germany Web site. The domain hijack attack happened at the end of August when visitors to the eBay.de site were redirected to a different DNS, meaning that they could not access auctions.

Panix.com, which was founded in 1989, provides Internet access and e-mail services to New York City, Long Island, Westchester, Rockland County and New Jersey.

Put these punks on the death penalty

And you'll see how fast these "youthful" high jinx comes to an end. These are bad seeds anyway. Remove them before they spawn and further contaminate the gene pool.

[Steven N]

Remarks like these...

...prove you are not much better.

You have just proven that you can drag someone from the middle ages and drop him in our time...

[Al Johnsons]

gene pool

http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_types.htm

[Dachi]

Registration date for record is 1/15/05 (yesterday)

Right now their DNS and whois records looke fine. I didn't look at the record/whois yesterday but I was able to surf to the correct .com with my caching name server.

My question is, was their domain hijacked, or did they forget to renew it and have someone else take advantage of it?

Because the whois record I am looking at shows the registration date listed as yesterday...

Not registered 1/15/05, UPDATED 1/15/05

Domain Name: PANIX.COM
Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com
Name Server: NS1.ACCESS.NET
Name Server: NS2.ACCESS.NET
Status: REGISTRY-LOCK
Updated Date: 16-jan-2005
Creation Date: 22-apr-1991
Expiration Date: 23-apr-2006

The date you saw was the day information was updated (like admin contacts, nameservers, and in this case, transfer to another registrar [http://melbourneit.com|http://melbourneit.com]).

[charodon]

This happens all the time

Domains are hijacked all the time, although they are not usually this important. Registrars often do little to help, or to prevent fraudulent transfers in the first place. Change is needed.

Steven N knows what needs to be done.

Just slap these boys on the wrist and wave your forefingure in front of them and say: NO NO NO.

This will learn them. Yep.

[TimeBomb]

Get a grip

You must not have a firm grip on sanity, if you're serious about wishing to put people to death for this sort of thing. I hardly think that capital punishment explains any increase in security on the New York subway.

You nailed it.

You "hardly think". Oooh.... All the experts must be wrong. You da man. You da man. You know everything by hardly thinking.

Yes, everyone should get a grip. Why. I should be able to highjak your machine, email account and id, no problem. All it is, is a little aggrevation, right? And so what if it costs you thousands of dollars? Nothing to it.

Why don't you be da man and post your pertinent info to prove all this highjacking will just be minor annoyances? Come on.

Say one thing and do another, huh?
Yeah, yous da man.