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GoDaddy Accounts Vulnerable To Social Engineering (and Photoshop)
itwbennett writes: On Tuesday, Steve Ragan's GoDaddy account was compromised. He knew it was coming, but considering the layered account protections used by the world's largest domain registrar, he didn't think the attacker would be successful. He was wrong. Within days, the attacker gained control over Steve's account just by speaking to customer support and submitting a Photoshopped ID.
This is reason 363956 why you don't want to use GoDaddy to host your name or accounts.
I'm not sure I believe this story. GoDaddy doesn't offer customer support, so how could the social engineers have spoken to them?
Really? Never heard of Identity Theft. Anybody can do the same thing and walk out of a bank with all my money. Unless you are recommending some sort of National ID system hard coded to my DNA, then these type of "hacks" will always happen, or at least you will know its your twin who stole it.
... is the name of a domain name I searched for on their site to see if they'd bite.
A few years ago I thought I'd buy a domain for myself. Went and searched for it on their site. NEVER DO THIS.
It wasn't taken.
I ummed and aahed and slept on it.
I came back. It was taken. By Domains By Proxy LLC. Who are owned by GoDaddy.
It seems to have been sold on to another speculator, unless Afternic are them too. (I just checked. Afternic were bought out by GoDaddy in 2013).
I own the .co.uk variant of it now. I used GANDI, who by all accounts, are not wankers.
So, if you want a domain, be prepared to buy it on the spot if it's available. And use a registrar who aren't arseholes.
Don't feed the huckster as I inadvertently did...
On the 1st page, I was confused by the alleged victim writing his description of the attack in the wrong person... then on page 3 you learn that the so-called "attack" on which the article was based is actually a fake attack (by the author, looking to boost hid street 'cred' as a security guru?) on an account setup just to be attacked for this article.
This sort of "story" is nothing but a dishonest ad, erroneously promoted on Slashdot.
[ben stein voice]Editor? ... Editor? ... Editor? [/ben stein voice]
I've noticed that a lot of companies demand a photo id to verify your identity when they have doubts. I refuse to ever do it for two reasons:
(1) Its practically inviting identity theft. I mean W T F? How do I know some disgruntled employee isn't keeping a copy of every scanned ID that comes in and then selling the info on some darknet market?
(2) Its totally forgeable. There is no way they verify that a scanned ID has not been photoshopped, all the anti-forgery stuff on them depends on it being the original copy, duh. It isn't like they can pull up a copy from the DMV. Some DMVs do sell the raw data (the ones that still do let you opt out of being sold when you get your license), but they sure don't sell a picture of the ID.
It has got to be one of the stupidest, ineffectual, bass-ackwards policies I've seen. And yet it is so common.
Yes, they are sure.
"This was probably overkill, but I’m a perfectionist when it comes to these things. The subtitles in the driver's license seal were no match for Photoshop's 'content aware and replace' feature. It wasn't perfect, so the majority of my time was spent pushing pixels until it looked right. A little blur and grain go a long way to making something look authentic," Mr. Troia said.
They should only accept orders as signed emails from a public key you provide on first registration.
I recently transferred one domain (I plan to transfer the rest), but came across an interesting issue in the process. The domain used a proxy registration to hide my information (as recommened in TFA), but, in order to allow the transfer, I had to disable the proxy registration and make it public. Thus, for some time, my privacy protection was not effective. Now this wasn't a big deal for me, but it could be for others.
Also, note that GoDaddy's domains by proxy makes the total cost of a private domain registration far higher than many other registrars.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
While it's cool to shit on GoDaddy here, it is not only that company that can fall to this type of an attack. They have to implement better security features themselves rather than just trying to sell their own version of 'security' to their customers (extra $$$ for preventing your name and email and whatever else, possibly address from being queried by whois).
I think at the very bare minimum they can implement some sort of a secure word / pin / voice password and maybe a call back to a phone number as a secondary measure.
You can't handle the truth.
Well if you're going to cry about it, here's a kleenex. And to help make you feel better, please have some jello. If you don't get the joke, google it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to xerox and fax my ID somewhere.
Edith Keeler Must Die
NearlyFreeSpeech.net offers many TLDs (not all) for registration. If you use them for DNS, their config page isn't that great IMO (it's a bit slow and cumbersome), but I like just about everything else about them.
Relevant to TFA: you can configure how many "recovery actions," between 2 and 7 (default: 3), which are required before you're granted access to lost account credentials. They also offer a "scorched earth" option: if you lose access to your account, it's gone forever (any associated services will persist until the account runs out of funds).
Screenshot of NFS.net account recovery settings
I did read the article. The guy worked with someone else to get access to his own account.
It doesn't require any special skill to exploit weak authentication requirements, so I doubt the article will result in a mass theft of domains.
This is exactly why I used PGP verification with InterNIC back in the day.
I like the sexiest opensource developers, but moderate sexy ones are okay, too.