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ICANN Loses Control of Its Own Domain Names
NotNormallyNormal writes "CBC picked up an AP story about ICANN recently losing control over two of their domain names on Thursday, June 26. A domain registrar run by the group transferred the domains to someone else. ICANN's press release had this to say: 'As has been widely reported, a number of domain names, including icann.com and iana.com were recently redirected to different DNS servers, allowing a group to provide visitors to those domains with their own website. It would appear the attack was sophisticated, combining both social and technological techniques, but was also limited and focused.' Comcast has had similar troubles lately as well."
In a perfect world, this would serve as a wake-up call to ICANN that the current domain name policies are hideously flawed.
Of course, their heads are so far up their collective asses, though, that they'll just say it was an awesome example of domain tasting by a third party, and all part of the glorious monstrosity they have birthed.
Ha Ha
/nelson
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
It's obvious they didn't follow their own rules by providing valid whois contact information.
When I first read this news several days ago, I thought it was referring to the root servers ...
What most don't know is that the TLDs (ie. com, .net, etc) themselves are registered in much the same manner as 2nd level domains are ... see the TLD Whois: http://whois.iana.org/
The major TLDs (.com, .net, etc) are relatively safe, since any changes would likely be difficult to get through - with any changes quickly noticed ... as in within minutes, or even seconds; likely wouldn't even be that effective, since the most popular TLDs zone dns entries are heavily cached.
However, ccTLDs are a different story completely, since ccTLD zone name server changes are more common and thus such change requests would be far less scrutinized.
I've never heard of any TLD being hijacked, but could likely be easily done, since the social engineering involved would be very similar. A frightening prospect.
Ron
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/04/icann-pwned.html
Anyone else think the URL is hilarious?
I hear a group of rogue trolls tricked ICANN into making Slashdot.org resolve to goatse.cx. You must've come back at the right time (or wrong time, depending on whether you're into the kind of stuff ;))
here comes the -1, I don't get it / -1, I don't like you
No, I'd say -1 Offtopic is sufficient, no need to invent new reasons to mod you down :-)
They had no problem getting the domains back. They just kept saying to themselves, "I think ICANN! I think ICANN!"
Hmm, in the CBC article is says "Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization's main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org, neither of which was affected by the attack."
What is to *re*direct here? DNS is there to translate domain names into IP addresses. It does not have any *re*direction mechanisms. Redirection is a feature of the HTTP protocol and would require to compromise the web-server (which they state has not happened.)
I wonder, Is this simply a typo or does the journalist/editor not understand what (s)he is writing about (and has no references to have this proof read)?
I'm rather vary, because I see such factual errors often in widely read media, written and edited by journalists. Sometimes I see even "experts" quoted with wrong statements. How does this reflect on news that I don't know so much about that I can spot the factual errors?
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
If they did that, it'd be Network Solutions all over again. Remember their exorbitant monopoly prices when they were the only shop in town? Like that.
Now it's old news and thus suitable for Slashdot. Before it was rough hot-off-the-press stuff.
We don't do that sort of thing here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!