MakeUseOf.com which is a very popular tech blog with over 20,000 RSS subscribers has become a victim of domain hi-jacking. The MakeUseOf domain is hosted through GoDaddy and somehow, the account was hacked where the perpetrator transfered the domain to a web hosting company in Dubai. Aibek who owns the domain recently stated:
We have absolutely no idea how this was achieved but we are currently in full contact with GoDaddy’s fraud department to get our legal property back. Obviously this is deeply embarrassing for us but we will not rest until the domain name is back in our possession. We have all worked too long and too hard to watch it all slip away like this.
MakeUseOf.com is an excellent resource that always makes the rounds of being read within my FeedReader. The speculation going around right now is that, a security hole was used inside of Gmail to retrieve the Gmail password which then gave the hijacker access to some other webmail. I hope Aibek is able to retrieve his domain and then on top of that, share the details on how this hijacking occurred.
What would you do if you were in Aibeks situation? Have you ever gone through a similar situation? Let me know in the comments.
Discovered via – Daily Blog Tips
11 thoughts on “MakeUseOf.com Victim Of Domain Hijacking”
This is one of the scariest things that could happen to a site owner. I know it’s hard to keep, but with good care and adequate security measures in place, you should be able to avoid your site being hijacked.
You may be surprised to learn that the site CPanel password was a dictionary word.
That said, there’s a feature on some domain that stops your domain changing hands unless you authorised it. I host with the same company that I bought my domain from, and on my control panel, there’s an option to disable domain transfer.
People should always make use of all the security features on their hosting package..
Thank you for this blog entry, I have to make sure that mine is now properly secure.
I never been in such situation and just now I heard such case. But I think every popular site owner must aware to this kind of fraud. To Aibek, I hope you will get this problem solved and have the domain back to you soon.
I have had a close call, but nothing concrete like that happen before. I’ve always used godaddy, and always pay attention to alert setting ans so on. That really is unfortunate though. I can imagine the thoughts rolling through your head though looking at the screen. Crazy.
sadly . how you can get it back.
That is pretty scary that something like that could happen. I better take a better look at my site.
That just shows you how important security is. Even the most secure blogs can get hacked. It’s a little scary. has anyone ever found out how they hacked the site and what measures we can take to stop it from happening to us?
Thanks,
Peter
Looks like they got their domain back up and running.
Be good if a group of the top web host companies could get together and throw around some ideas for stopping this stuff happening…
Kind of incredible how it can happen too.
There must be ways to prevent this type of thing… Way to legalize ownership perhaps?
I just checked his page… shows nothing at the moment.
Thanks
Martin
I’ve been thinking about it and yes, it would be horrible for me to come back from a vacation only to discover that my domain no longer belonged to me. Hopefully, the domain comes back and better than ever. I don’t see him giving up 20,000 RSS readers lightly.
Could you imagine that happening to you? Man just think you have your power house blog and you go away for the weekend and come home and find out that its no longer yours. That would just be horable. And to the fact that if you did somehow get it back all the troulbe you have to go to get it up running again. I guess as long as tech is being made there is always someone out there trying to bring it down. I also think it would be on the domain service to be in part of this since it was their service that got hacked. Anyway thats my two cents. Hope all works out for them.
I’m in completely opposing position and currently try to help my friend to get their domain back. It was registered by their old webmaster who register the domain after his name and his personal email through a local OnlineNic reseller. Then he somehow decided to quit his web business and let his domain (which used for registering my friend’s domain) expired. The expired domain then renewed by someone else.
We tried our best to prove that we are the legal owner of the domain by giving out all legal information and IDs we can get. However, we weren’t able to provide some codes that was provided when the domain initially registered (Good God, how on earth we can have those codes anyway?). Oh well, now my friend’s company can’t get their own domain they already use in 4 years simply because they don’t use email used for registering the domain (i know, they deserve it, but nobody tells this thing can happen to them). So our choice now is whether we wait our domain expire and try to renew it (which will be so stupid to wait the hours on the domain to be released/expired)or get some legal help.
Nevermind the rules and anything like that, I think this is absurd. Who’s this domain reseller protecting the domain from anyway? I think in our case ‘too safe’ is bad as well 😀
Sorry for the rambling.
Anyway, i hope everything can be solved soon for makeuseof.com. Hearing what happened to David Airey i think this can be resolved anytime soon. Believe.
Cheers.
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