[wplug] wplug hijacked?

[Michael H. Semcheski]

I have had some experience with hijackings from registrars, or at least I
have some clients who have had that experience.

These clients had someone create a website and register a domain name for
them.  The person registered the name with enom.com.  Everything was fine
for a while, but the person who setup the website and registered the name
went to graduate school, got married, started a business, and more or less
forgot about the dns name.  The long story made short is the domain
registration lapsed.  enom.com has it in what is known as 'extended
redemption'.  The original registrants contact information is on the DNS
record, but enom:
1) Apparently blocks his attempts to transfer the domain.
2) Has had a 'squatting' site at that specific name for about 6 months.
3) Will not the domain name be reregistered.

I am pointing this out for two reasons.  First, enom is evil.  We (myself
and the rightful owners) offered them cash, more than was "owed" on the
original registrants account, just to have it transferred away, but they
couldn't be bothered.  This is not an isolated incident, a search of the
internet will turn up many other sad stories like this one.  Second, I
feared this, or something similar, might have happened to wplug.org.  I've
found it is usually more effective to act quickly than to wait a while
before trying to get things straightened out.

So, in short, I'm glad that things are fine.  Thanks Beth!

On 5/26/07, Beth Lynn <bethlynn at wplug.org> wrote:
>
> OK folks here is what is going on.
>
> There was an outage of most of wplug's IT resources yesterday
>
> This includes:
> All mailing lists
> The website, www.wplug.org and erie.wplug.org
> The wiki, wplug.ece.cmu.edu
> email service for the @wplug.org domain
>
> Not effected:
> The irc channel #wplug on irc.freenode.net
> The docs mirror ldp.wplug.org
>
> In response to this outage, I decided that we need to switch to another
> DNS provider ASAP. In my haste, made a mistake when migrating the DNS to
> joker.com. I failed to save the name records therefore some users this
> morning saw a generic site from joker.com and not our website. I
> apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
>
> To be perfectly clear, wplug.org is not now or has it ever been
> "hijacked." The ip address of www.wplug.org is 128.2.194.8 as it has been
> for years. Joker.com has been our domain registrar for several years as
> well. The only thing that has changed since Thursday is that the DNS
> servers for wplug.org are now with joker.com.
>
> Thanks,
> Beth Lynn Eicher
> _______________________________________________
> wplug mailing list
> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug
>
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